Simon & Schuster
Published September 1, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Things are going well for Seattle detective Chelsey Calhoun. She’s expecting her first child and she and her husband are delighted. But when she investigates the case of an Asian woman who has been stabbed to death, and her teenage daughter missing, she throws herself into the disturbing case. It all starts with discovering the woman who called herself Anne was really Rika Takahashi, clearly on the run from something or someone. As she pieces the clues together, we travel back to the past of the murdered woman.
Growing up, she lives in a Japanese village with her mother, an unmarried woman, and her grandmother. Wanting to escape the impoverished backwater, she travels to Tokyo, begins working in a hostess bar, and falls in love with a Yakuza member, a relationship that leads to engagement, a pregnancy, and then unexpected danger. When staying with a friend from the hostess bar, worried about the threats facing her, she runs into a kind American dentist who falls for her and wants to take her to his home in Idaho. For her unborn child’s sake, she agrees.
It turns out he’s not so kind after all, one link in a chain that has bound together many women, a chain Chelsey Calhoun has to untangle to find the missing teen. The girl is also doing her own investigation of her mother’s past, rousing the kind of danger her mother strove to escape. Searching for the history of this mysterious woman and her daughter parallels Chelsey’s own questions about her past, as an Asian adoptee raised by parents who didn’t want her to ask about her origins.
This engrossing and emotionally-charged story is often challenging thanks to its depiction of abusive relationships. But it’s hard to put down, as a well-plotted multi-vocal mystery with compelling characters.