A Hard Light
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Maggie tries to unravel an art theft that began during the Vietnam WarDuring the chaotic last act of the Vietnam War, three people tried to preserve the art from the French colonial museum in Da Nang. As Viet Cong forces overwhelmed the South Vietnamese, Bao Ngo, Khanh Nguyen, and Minh Tam sped south, in trucks laden with all the treasures of eighteen hundred years of Vietnamese history. Although one truck disappeared, those three made it to Saigon just as the Americans pulled out. Minh and Khanh escaped on the last helicopter, Minh waving goodbye to Bao, the cousin he expected he would never see again. Decades later, Khanh is at home in Los Angeles when Bao reappears, gun in hand. He ransacks her house and disappears. Maggie MacGowen, documentary filmmaker, looks into the incident, interviewing Khanh and Minh, who disappear just after she turns off her camera. She presses on, determined to understand this decades-old mystery, no matter how dangerous the past might be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her fifth adventure, documentary filmmaker Maggie MacGowen (77th Street Requiem, etc.) is caught up in an intricate and long-reaching web of family problems. With her lover, LAPD detective Mike Flint, only months away from retirement and burnt out from the juvenile offenders he constantly arrests, Maggie, who has recently had a miscarriage, becomes just as disenchanted with the bleeding-heart stories of criminal youths and their dysfunctional families that she is expected to produce for her TV network bosses. After her old friend Khanh Nguyen is hurt when her home is invaded, Maggie agrees to track down the Vietnamese man who attacked her and find out why the Khanh's former friend would beat her. Meanwhile, she's busy trying to sell her San Francisco house while Mike works at placing his alcoholic father in another treatment center. As she questions people and uses her network of informants to locate Khanh's assailant, Maggie is stunned to learn that her ex-husband, Scott, was involved when Khanh and others smuggled Vietnamese museum treasures out of the country during the war. Delving into the circuitous route that the treasures have taken and finally understanding how many people are looking for the artifacts, she ends up endangering both herself and her extended family. The familial twists and turns occasionally become too obscure for the reader to follow, but Hornsby's fluent style carries this story to its satisfying conclusion.
