Koreatown Blues

November 21, 2016
Wes Norgaard, the narrator of travel writer Rogers’s entertaining, fast-paced first novel, is happy enough just to survive, living in a tiny apartment and managing a carwash in the sprawling L.A. neighborhood known as Koreatown. He enjoys having a beer and singing an occasional song in his local karaoke bar, where he’s usually the only white guy. One night at the bar, a Korean man dressed in a sharp-looking suit gets his head blown off by a shotgun. Like everyone else present, Wes didn’t see the shooter. Meanwhile, the bar’s owner, Ms. Tam, offers Wes a deal that could put him on easy street. If Wes will marry an attractive young Korean woman, Soo Jin, Ms. Tam will pay him enough cash to allow him to buy the carwash. The hitch is that a rival Korean family has vowed to wipe out Soo’s family, all her previous husbands having been executed. The plot follows a predictable course as Wes dodges bullets and cooks up plans to keep everyone alive, until the unexpected, up-to-date solution to the blood feud.