Child of My Winter

May 8, 2017
As much a whydunit as a whodunit, Lanh’s memorable fourth Rick Van Lam mystery (after 2016’s No Good to Cry) finds the Hartford, Conn., insurance-claim PI also working as a part-time instructor in Farmington College’s criminal justice program. The son of a Vietnamese mother and an unknown U.S. soldier, Rick remembers well how it felt to be treated as a social outcast, which is why he decides one day to reach out to a lonely, withdrawn student of Vietnamese heritage, Anh Ky “Dustin” Trang, sitting at a table in the student union. That Dustin rejects Rick’s initial overture doesn’t stop the kindhearted detective from helping the kid when he’s later suspected of murdering a beloved professor. Investigating the crime turns out to be less important than portraying Dustin’s appalling family and the toxic paralysis of Vietnamese refugees who can’t accept that the war has long been over. Lanh (the pseudonym of Ed Ifkovic) excels at creating quirky, complicated characters.

May 1, 2017
The Vietnam War continues to cast long shadows.Even though half-Vietnamese private investigator and part-time college professor Rick van Lam still has nightmares about growing up in an orphanage in Vietnam, his life has materially improved over the years. Although he's primarily an insurance investigator in Hartford, most of the other cases he has been involved with (No Good to Cry, 2016, etc.) seem to involve Vietnam. So his friends aren't surprised when he gets interested in Anh Ky Trang, aka Dustin, a bright scholarship student at Farmington College who keeps to himself and is ignored or bullied by other students. Dustin's favorite professor is activist firebrand Ben Winslow, a friend of Rick's, so Rick is shocked to see the two men having a belligerent argument. Neither combatant will tell Rick what the fight was about, and when Winslow is shot dead in the parking lot, Dustin is an obvious suspect. Although Rick and his friend Hank try their best, they can't pry any information out of Dustin and must resort to gossip from the tightknit Vietnamese community. Dustin, who has two older brothers, is an unloved child, born late in his mother's life during an accident that killed his father. His mother, aunt, and uncle, an aide to Gen. Westmoreland, lived a comfortable life in Vietnam until they were flown out before the collapse. Now the family remains frozen in time, refusing to move on, getting by on welfare while they talk about returning to the good life back home. If Rick and his friends are to clear Dustin, they must discover his secret or find someone else who wanted Winslow dead. As complex and tricky as Lanh's other Vietnam-centric mysteries, with a psychological component that makes this installment especially intense.

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May 1, 2017
PI Rick van Lam's fourth case brings back memories of his troubled past as a bui doi, a child of dust. As the son of an unknown American GI and a Vietnamese mother, he was despised but lucky enough to be sent to the U.S., where he ended up in Hartford, Connecticut, teaching criminology at a local college and building his PI business. When a part-time scholarship student, Dustin Trang, becomes the object of bullies, Rick wants to help him, but Dustin isn't receptive. Then a professor who also reached out to Dustin is murdered on campus, and Dustin becomes the prime suspect. Rick and his friend Hank Nguyen, a Connecticut State Police officer, set out to save Dustin from arrest for a crime he didn't commit. Their investigation will take them into the past, where the scars of the Vietnam War haven't healed in the divided immigrant community. This complex and very timely story is a riveting study of greed and betrayal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)