First published 2021
Aki Ito steps off the train in Chicago with her parents in 1944. They have just been released from Manzanar detention camp, where the government held them after Pearl Harbor along with thousands of other Japanese Americans. Their old life in California no longer exists. Now they must start over in a city two thousand miles from home, where Aki's older sister Rose was resettled months earlier in the Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But Rose will not be there to greet them. The night before their arrival, she died under a subway train. Officials call it suicide. Aki refuses to accept this verdict. Rose was everything Aki aspired to be: perfect, polished, optimistic. She would never have chosen to end her life. Aki knows her sister better than anyone, and her instincts scream that something else happened. She becomes determined to uncover what really killed Rose, even if she must investigate alone.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, suspenseful
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Chicago, California, Manzanar
Period: 1944
305 pages · Hardcover · Soho Crime