Dragonfish - Tapa blanda

"This is a good juicy noir with plenty of violence, intertwined with a sensitive narrative about the perils of the immigrant experience." --Sunday Express

"There are traces of both Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane in the storytelling, but Tran, a Vietnamese born in Saigon and raised in Oklahoma, has an elegant, distinctive voice that sent a shiver up my spine... One not to be missed." --Daily Mail

"An elegantly-written, elegaic novel about trust and the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person; a world that lingers with you. Highly recommended." --Promoting Crime Fiction

"Literature at its best." --diaCritics

"It's a dark and sometimes violent book, but Tran sometimes interrupts Robert's story to tell you Suzy's and you realize that absolutely nothing is as it seems." --Book Riot

Vu Tran has written a thrilling and cinematic work of sophisticated suspense and haunting lyricism set in motion by characters who can neither trust each other nor trust themselves. This remarkable debut is a noir page-turner resonant with the lasting reverberations of lives lost and lives remade a generation ago.

Robert, an Oakland cop, still can't let go of Suzy, the enigmatic Vietnamese wife who left him two years ago. Now she's disappeared from her new husband, Sonny, a violent Vietnamese smuggler and gambler who is blackmailing Robert into finding her for him. As he pursues her through the sleek and seamy gambling dens of Las Vegas, shadowed by Sonny's sadistic son, 'Junior', and assisted by unexpected and reluctant allies, Robert learns more about his ex-wife than he ever did during their marriage. He finds himself chasing the ghosts of her past, one that reaches back to a refugee camp in Malaysia after the fall of Saigon, and his investigation uncovers the existence of an elusive packet of her secret letters to someone she left behind long ago.

As Robert starts illuminating the dark corners of Suzy's life, the legacy of her sins threatens to immolate them all.