Dragonfish, by Vu Tran

Oakland cop Robert has been blackmailed by his ex-wife's new husband Sonny to track her down. She's gone missing and as Robert begins his investigations he finds that she's also taken $100,000 from her husband's safe. Suzy emigrated from Vietnam when she was a young woman, enduring difficult circumstances on the boat leaving Vietnam as well as in the camp where the emigrants waited for someone in the U.S. or elsewhere to sponsor them. As Robert tries to find Suzy in the Las Vegas casinos and hotels that she frequented, he learns more about her past and the many secrets that she kept from his all these years.

Dragonfish alternates between first person accounts narrated by Robert and letters that Suzy wrote to her daughter Mai, abandoned with other family members not long after they settled in Los Angeles. As Suzy recounts her story to Mai through the letters, we learn about the death of her first husband, the violence they experienced in the camps, and her desire to be alone to start over again once they arrived in America. Present day events narrated by Robert are full of violence and anger, both Robert's anger over Sonny's abuse of Suzy, but Sonny's anger over Suzy's abandonment and theft of his money. Both Sonny and his son Junior are members of a Vietnamese underground crime world in Las Vegas where violence is common and expected.

However, parts of this book didn't ring true for me. All of Robert's actions are motivated by his unending love for Suzy, but nowhere does he explain what it was about her that was lovable. His memories about her are all based on her emotional ups and downs, her anger and violence. It's simply not convincing. I suppose the noir genre requires the man to make bad decisions in order to save a woman in danger, but Robert's a police officer and I expected him to be a little more sensible. In spite of all the twists and turns, the violence and action, I found Dragonfish to be a little slow moving. Nevertheless, it would probably be a good choice for fans of noir and it's getting some decent reviews on Amazon (although the average rating is 3.7 out of 5 stars).

Vu Tran. Dragonfish. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. Advance reading copy. 296 pages. ISBN 9780393077803.