Chelsey and her husband have just heard their baby's heartbeat at the obstetrician's office and were elated to find out that they're having a girl. After the appointment, she gets a message from Detective Montoya, her partner at the Seattle Police Department. A woman's body was found stabbed in her rental home. When they arrived at the crime scene, they noticed that the woman was of Asian descent, and that the house was practically bare of personal items. Her teen-aged daughter Naomi was missing. When Chelsey looked through Naomi's room she found a yellowing photo of Anne, a little girl, and another young woman, who was identified as Anne's school contact and the owner of their house. They started their questioning with her. Mayumi lived in a beautiful apartment in the best Seattle address. She knew Anne, or Rika as she was called in Tokyo, many years ago in an upscale hostess bar. Rika had a love affair with a minor member of the Japanese yakuza that went badly, and Mayumi helped her-twice. She was very upset about the murder and hoped that Naiomi was safe.
It doesn't give much away that we know that Naiomi is alive but in a dangerous situation. She is in some room on a steel cot with an IV in her arm, and she is drugged into insensibility. Where is she? Who murdered her mother? And why does Naiomi have flashes of another life that her mother denies she ever lived?
This book really keeps the reader guessing until the last few pages. The novel takes us from rural Japan where Rika lived with her mother and grandmother, to the Tokyo bar scene where Rika gets her heart broken and Naiomi is conceived, and to America where she attempts to start a new life. As Chelsey follows the scanty clues, she finds herself conflicted. She is also of Japanese descent and was adopted by a white family who told her that she was found abandoned in a firebox. At eight years old she asked too many questions about the adoption, and her police chief father brought her into his study and shut the discussion down-she remembers a fire in the fireplace. Was he burning papers?
Sometimes the truth will come out despite the machinations of the powerful to hide it-and sometimes it isn't pretty.
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