Rick Van Lam Mysteries
1 primary work • 2 total works
Book 4
Rick van Lam is bui doi, ''''''''a child of dust,'''''''' as the Vietnamese scornfully called a mixed-blood kid whose father was an unknown American GI. But Rick was lucky-in time he was sent to America. And he's ended up in Hartford, Connecticut, where he's made a life as a private eye after leaving a career as a cop at the NYPD. Rick is also teaching a part-time course at Farmington College where brainy Vietnamese student Dustin Trang, a scholarship student with no social skills and an oddly hostile family, is scorned and bullied. It reminds Rick of his own miserable days in a Saigon orphanage and he reaches out. But Dustin rebuffs him. One night as a blizzard strikes, a professor is shot down in the campus parking lot. The man had befriended Justin, but their relationship had visibly soured. Dustin is everyone's hot suspect for the murder, but Rick believes the boy is innocent. Oddly, Dustin seems indifferent to others' suspicion that he's a killer. And he seems resistant to helping his case. Rick knows he owes who he has become to the loving support of his friend, Hank Nguyen, and Hank's multigenerational family. To pay it forward for Justin, Rick persuades Hank, a state cop, and some of his circle of Hartford friends to dig into Dustin's dysfunctional world, interviewing faculty and students, relatives, and a busy congregation that seems to be a focal point for the fractured Trang family. As the investigation stalls and the cops close in, Rick realizes he has to break though a web of lies, anger, and betrayals, and force Justin to reveal whatever it is he fears more than arrest for murder.
When Marta Kowalski is discovered beneath the Farmington River Bridge, the police write off her death as an unfortunate suicide. Marta had become depressed since the death of an old friend. Marta was a simple woman who cleaned houses, mostly for elderly professors, and faithfully attended Mass. Sometimes she went gambling in Atlantic City or at the Indian casinos. She had no enemies, let alone friends. Murder? There's no evidence of a crime. Yet her niece Karen is convinced of foul play. She hires Amerasian Rick Van Lam, the only investigator she knows in this bedroom community. He had never really cared for Marta. Yes, she'd dusted his apartment a couple of times, but she was a little too nosy. And she'd fought with a local gardener, a full-blooded Vietnamese man. Jimmy, his mentor and partner at nearby Hartford, Connecticut's Gaddy Associates, aces at insurance fraud, frowns on Rick taking another murder case. But aided by his sidekick Hank Nguyen and Hank's wise Buddhist grandmother, Rick begins asking questions and finds himself mired in affluent Farmington's parochial pettiness and scandal.
Digging deeper, he unearths rivalries, jealousies, and viciousness to shame a Miss Marple village" and realizes to his amazement that Marta was no mere unassuming housekeeper. Any number of townsfolk had reason to shove her off that bridge" one of them mind-blowing.
Digging deeper, he unearths rivalries, jealousies, and viciousness to shame a Miss Marple village" and realizes to his amazement that Marta was no mere unassuming housekeeper. Any number of townsfolk had reason to shove her off that bridge" one of them mind-blowing.