Lu’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Marina, a high school senior, is engaged to marry twenty-four-year-old Michael Ho, a man who works in her father’s bank. Unfortunately the marriage is fated not to occur. Marina is found dead in her fancy sports car in the parking lot of a shopping mall. The police are labeling the death a car jacking that misfired, though the condition of the car and body don’t tend to support this assumption.

Eve Diamond is the Los Angeles Times reporter assigned to cover the case. Her first line of inquiry is to interview the dead girl’s parents. Marina’s father agrees only grudgingly to be interviewed, saying her mother is too distraught to talk. Eve, correctly as it is later proven, suspects the mother is still in Hong Kong.

Initial probes indicate that Marina and her brother, Colin, are among those so called “parachute children” left in the United States under the care of a housekeeper who really has little contact with the children. What is particularly enigmatic in this case is Marina’s proposed marriage, which was to occur on the heels of her high school graduation. Why go to the trouble and expense of educating the girl if she is to be the ornamental wife of a much older man?

In her efforts to obtain background information on Marina and other parachute children, Eve unearths another subculture of young Asians who are not as fortunate financially as Marina had been. Young Asian girls have been given passage to the United States for a minimal fee, thinking that they could work in the U.S. and send much needed earnings back to their families in China. Alas, they are entering illegally and are forced by their “benefactor” to become sex slaves for his profit.

The story line itself, as Eve probes into what she believes to be the murder of Marina Lu, moves along at a brisk pace in a generally logical manner. On a couple of occasions the author does seem to be reaching to place Eve in a situation where she can obtain essential information. Why would an Asian teenager who has just met Eve entrust Marina’s diary to her? At any rate, the plot is unique enough to engage most readers’ interest from page one and hold it until completion.

However, the real power of the novel is Ms. Hamilton’s ability to accurately relate the plight of young Asian immigrants in the United States. Admittedly, the situation of the wealthy Marina Lu is in stark contrast with May-Li from provincial China, yet the reader can only pity each girl’s plight. Each has to cope with a set of circumstances at an extremely young age - an age that women many years older, and, presumably, wiser and more experienced, would find trying. Not only must they cope with living in a culture vastly different from the one they left, but they must do it without any adult. They are caught between trying to fit in with the locals and trying to maintain some of their cultural heritage.

Reporter Eve Diamond is an interesting character in herself. She can be the hard-nosed, insensitive brute intent on getting a good story, yet she is sensitive to the needs of the Asian kids she meets. Let’s hope Ms. Hamilton has her lined up for a return engagement.

--Andy Plonka