"When a client cancels a New Orleans shoot at the last minute, boudoir photographer Josie Parks decides to visit the city anyway and meets Spencer Pham after hitting him in the head while attempting to catch Mardi Gras beads."--

On the Texas Gulf coast, where the oil rigs stand idle and the shrimp fishing has dwindled to almost nothing, a Vietnamese fisherman is found dead in his shack. The local sheriff rules suicide, but deputy sheriff Tom Poole, a Vietnam War veteran, thinks the fisherman's death deserves at least an investigation. The sheriff refuses so Poole sets out on his own to discover murder and gold.

After a woman is shot in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Chicago, Detective John Thinnes realizes he knew the victim when he was stationed in Vietnam. In fact, he was the best man when his friend Bobby Lee married Hue An. When an anonymous tip comes in that Thinnes might be the real father of her son, Tien Lee, who is the prime suspect in her murder, he is pulled off the case and his partner Don Franchi takes over. At Hue and Lee's wake, a schizophrenic...

"Two high school BFFs reunite and endeavor to fix each other's lives"--

Saigon fell to the Viet Cong on April 30, 1975. Kien Nguyen was there. He watched the last U.S. Army helicopter leave without him, without his brother, without his mother, without his grandparents. Told with stark and poetic brilliance, this is a story of survival, a story of hope--a moving and personal recorded of a tumultuous and important piece of history.