Return to Dust

August 31, 2015
In Lanh’s absorbing second Rick Van Lam mystery (after 2014’s Caught Dead), Rick’s talkative house cleaner, Marta Kowalski, whom the investigator doesn’t like much, takes a fatal fall from a Farmington, Conn., bridge into the Farmington River. The police rule Marta’s death a suicide, but when her attractive niece, Karen Corcoran, calls on Rick and insists that her aunt was murdered, Rick takes the case. In a search of Marta’s home, Rick finds evidence of her Catholic piety and her quaint reading habits—but none of depression. Marta did incite strong feelings in the people in her life. Her nephew, for example, loathed her. And then there’s the tricky circumstance that Karen stands to benefit from an insurance policy if it can be proved that her aunt’s death wasn’t suicide. Lively supporting characters include Rick’s ex-wife, Liz, and pal Hank Nguyen. Lanh (the pseudonym of Ed Ifkovic) seamlessly fills in their backstories.

August 15, 2015
Did she jump or was she pushed? That's what Amerasian college instructor/detective Rick Van Lam's client wants to know. Although the Connecticut detective agency in which Rick (Caught Dead, 2014) is a partner deals mostly with insurance companies, he occasionally takes outside cases. He barely knows Karen Corcoran, who wants to hire him, but her recently deceased aunt, Marta Kowalski, was his cleaning lady, so he agrees to investigate her death, which the police have dismissed as suicide. Well-known in Farmington, Marta was an argumentative, often grumpy, deeply religious Catholic who nevertheless flirted with men, frequented bars, and took trips to Vegas. Although she appears to have leaped from a bridge, Karen is convinced she was murdered. Rick gets some help from his former student Hank Nguyen, whose Vietnamese-immigrant family has all but adopted Rick, who spent his early years in an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City. Although Rick is still scorned by some Vietnamese for being of mixed race, Hank's family provides an entry into the community. He learns that one of the people Marta fought with was a refugee who did lawn care for Joshua Jennings, a patrician college professor Marta dreamed of marrying. It might seem that Jennings' death and the sale of his ancient house, which Marta adored, pushed her over the edge. The more Rick digs into her surprisingly complicated life, however, the more convinced he grows that she was murdered. Lanh delves into the problems facing many in the Vietnamese community while providing a tantalizing look at the way a woman's obsessions led to her death.

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