Under A Gilded Moon; A Tangled Mercy, an Editors’ Choice recipient from the Historical Novel Society; Blue Hole Back Home, winner of the Christy Award for Best First Novel; and two children’s books. Raised in the foothills of the southern Appalachians, she lived nearly a decade of her young adult years in New England, which she still misses—and jumps at every chance to visit. She holds two master’s degrees and a PhD in English and has taught literature and writing at several universities.
At CrimeReads Jordan-Lake tagged "five mysteries that include all the twists we expect of a good whodunit, while also diving deep into what it means to be human, and the ways in which the inequities, privations and privileges of our own cultures can shape us." One title on the list:
Clark and Division by Naomi HiraharaRead about another entry on the list.
Hirahara spent thirty years researching this novel, and it shows in all the best ways. A New York Times Best Mystery of the Year, Clark and Divisionrefers to the area of Chicago where the Ito family is relocating after being released from Manzanar, the U.S. government’s detention camp for Japanese citizens during WW2. As twenty-year-old Aki Ito searches for answers about her revered older sister’s death, which authorities have labeled a suicide but Aki suspects was murder, the story unfolds in multiple layers. Hirahara’s own parents were survivors of the Hiroshima bombing, and perhaps partly because of her family’s story, the author explores history not as dusty old facts but as mystery, crevices of human experience we’ve not always explored fully or well. In Clark & Division, she has woven a story that is both captivating historical fiction and thriller.
Clark and Division is among Brittany Bunzey's fifteen top books that take place during or around World War II.
--Marshal Zeringue
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