Dragonfish

Starred review from June 8, 2015
Tran’s thriller debut revolves around an elusive woman who seems lost in her own private—and haunted—world. Robert Ruen is an Oakland, Calif., police officer whose Vietnamese ex-wife, Suzy, has remarried a shady Las Vegan gambler named Sonny Van Nguyen, a figure with whom she shares a distant past. When Suzy disappears, Ruen is strong-armed by Sonny’s son, Junior, to help track down the woman Ruen never really knew. His search transpires in a wonderfully noirish Las Vegas, including second-tier casinos and strip-mall restaurants concealing underground aquariums stocked with illegal and exotic creatures—the titular dragonfish among them. Interspersed with Ruen’s quest is Suzy’s own first-person narrative about fleeing with her daughter war-torn Vietnam by boat for a Malaysian refugee camp. These long sections, addressed to the daughter she abandoned upon reaching the States, occasionally interrupt the novel’s momentum. However, they also feature the strongest writing and elegantly reveal the roots of Suzy’s mercurial behavior: “Everything that has happened since seems a shadow of what happened there.” This is a most enjoyable mystery, from its distinct, dazzling premise all the way to its satisfying conclusion.

June 1, 2015
A missing person mystery is delicately entwined with a heartbreaking story of migration and loss. The Vietnam of the past and the Las Vegas of the present are vividly evoked in this debut novel in which hard-boiled noir is seamlessly blended with reminiscences of exile. A two-fisted policeman from Oakland, California, finds both his life and sense of certainty upended by Suzy, the Vietnamese wife who abandoned him with thwarted desires and unanswered questions. It turns out he's not the only ex-husband looking for her. She's now fled from a short-tempered smuggler named Sonny, who's also a refugee from the fall of Saigon and leans on the reluctant cop hard enough to make him search her last-known whereabouts, Vegas. What the cop finds, to his surprise, is Suzy's estranged daughter, Mai, a professional poker player who's something of a tough-talking, hard-boiled case herself; though he also recognizes in Mai more than just a strong physical resemblance to Suzy: "I could see her mother's stubbornness....All the loneliness that comes with refusing anything sensible the world gives you." The author intersperses the mercurial tale of the search with long, detailed letters written to Mai by Suzy recounting the wrenching, often perilous passage from Vietnam in the mid-1970s to a Malaysian refugee camp. It is in this testimony that Tran's writing achieves a fluidity and grace that make you share his enigmatic antiheroine's aching loss and sense of dislocation. (One of the most resonant of these memories involves using pork fat to help gas up a boat used for escaping Vietnam and how it makes the hungry passengers remember restaurants and kitchens of their past lives.) He's on less solid footing bringing the policeman's first-person narrative to life but nonetheless skillfully identifies the roots of whatever is stalking Mai, Suzy, and others with recriminations and regrets; much like the Vietnam War itself, which created such torment and whose sorrowful legacy resounds generations later. Right off the bat, Tran displays the most admirable and worthwhile gift a serious thriller writer can have: compassion toward even the most disreputable of his characters.

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July 1, 2015
In Las Vegas, white Oakland cop Robert finds himself in a Vietnamese gangster's elaborate underground bunker surrounded by floor-to-ceiling aquariums containing stingrays, sharks, and a dragonfish, an endangered Asian species believed to bring good luck, keep evil away, bring the family together. But there is no way this glimmering creature is going to protect anyone from anything in Vu Tran's nuanced and elegiac, noirish first novel. Robert's ex-wife, Hong, whom he calls Suzy, is debilitated by sorrow and haunted by ghosts and guilt. Her second husband, Vegas high-roller Sonny, has badly beaten her, and brooding Robert intends to avenge her, diving heedlessly into a world of secrets and anguish he cannot decipher. While lacerating flashbacks disclose the harrowing details of Hong's perilous boat exodus from war-torn Vietnam and precarious interlude in a Malaysian refugee camp, bumbling Robert discovers the true source of her suffering. Vu Tran takes a strikingly poetic and profoundly evocative approach to the conventions of crime fiction in this supple, sensitive, wrenching, and suspenseful tale of exile, loss, risk, violence, and the failure to love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2015

A young, confused Vietnamese woman leaves her dying husband and native home as communists lay waste to her life. In a Malaysian camp with her young daughter, Hong meets Sonny, another refugee with a son, and together they form an alliance. Revealing her story in flashback fits and starts, Hong speaks in sparse, cryptic passages intermixed with longer, more clearly delineated chapters narrated by her second husband, Oakland police officer Robert, who calls her Suzy. Hong's life is a meandering, tangled knot resulting in severe depression, which Robert finds irksome. Leaving Robert, she turns to Sonny, now a cruel smuggler, gambler, and alcoholic. Once again married to Sonny and living in Las Vegas, Hong suffers domestic abuse and then goes missing. Sonny, with the help of Sonny Jr., forces Robert to find Hong. In Vegas, Robert uncovers layers of Hong's past, her relationship to Sonny, and his own foibles. VERDICT This haunting and mesmerizing debut is filled with all the noir elements--a dark and seedy underworld, damsels in distress, tarnished heroes, and a blurring of moral boundaries. It examines such themes as culture, desperation, memory, mental illness, love, loss, and redemption. Highly recommended for mystery fans. [See Prepub Alert, 3/2/15.]--Jeffrey W. Hunter, Royal Oak, MI

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015

From Quan Barry's She Weeps Each Time You're Born to Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, 2015 has started with major debut fiction from Vietnamese American writers. Here's another from a Whiting Award winner. Oakland cop Robert Ruen can't get over Suzy, the tough but reticent Vietnamese wife who left him. Now she appears to have left her new husband, a merciless Vietnamese smuggler. As Robert travels through Las Vegas's shady gambling dens trying to find her, he must painfully unfold Suzy's secret past in a Malaysian refugee camp.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015

A young, confused Vietnamese woman leaves her dying husband and native home as communists lay waste to her life. In a Malaysian camp with her young daughter, Hong meets Sonny, another refugee with a son, and together they form an alliance. Revealing her story in flashback fits and starts, Hong speaks in sparse, cryptic passages intermixed with longer, more clearly delineated chapters narrated by her second husband, Oakland police officer Robert, who calls her Suzy. Hong's life is a meandering, tangled knot resulting in severe depression, which Robert finds irksome. Leaving Robert, she turns to Sonny, now a cruel smuggler, gambler, and alcoholic. Once again married to Sonny and living in Las Vegas, Hong suffers domestic abuse and then goes missing. Sonny, with the help of Sonny Jr., forces Robert to find Hong. In Vegas, Robert uncovers layers of Hong's past, her relationship to Sonny, and his own foibles. VERDICT This haunting and mesmerizing debut is filled with all the noir elements--a dark and seedy underworld, damsels in distress, tarnished heroes, and a blurring of moral boundaries. It examines such themes as culture, desperation, memory, mental illness, love, loss, and redemption. Highly recommended for mystery fans. [See Prepub Alert, 3/2/15.]--Jeffrey W. Hunter, Royal Oak, MI

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 28, 2015
In Tran’s striking debut crime novel, Oakland, Calif., cop Robert Ruen could be a poster boy for noir fiction. A few years before the story begins, his Vietnamese wife, Suzy, suddenly deserted him for no apparent reason. He eventually found her in Las Vegas, living with Sonny Van Nguyen, a shady but obviously successful Vietnamese smuggler, gambler, and restaurateur. The novel begins with his being visited by minions of Sonny’s cool, sinister son, Junior. Suzy has disappeared and Junior, using threats, forces the detective to return to Sin City to search for her. This part of the thriller is narrated by Ruen, with reader Taylorson catching every rise and fall of his emotional thrill ride, notably his fear of Sonny and Junior, and his desire to help Suzy at any cost. The Chicago-based voice actor imparts a deadly seriousness to Sonny’s shifting, excessive moods and adds a silkiness to Junior’s emotionless demands; he is also convincing in his subtle Vietnamese inflections. Ruen’s narration is interrupted by segments from Suzy’s secret letters, written to the daughter she was forced to abandon at a point in her tumultuous past. These sad, yet lyrically penned missives are gracefully and passionately performed by reader Wu. Ruen’s story gives the book top crime credentials, but it’s Suzy’s letters, lovingly rendered by Wu, that lift it above its genre trappings. A Norton hardcover.