I have to agree with the Los Angeles Times who named this one of the best books of 1999. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful books I've ever read. Alfreda Vea seemlesly weaves his story between present day San Francisco and the Vietnam war. I don't want to tell anymore as it might spoil things for the reader!



















The Los Angeles Times named this one of the best books of 1999

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A novel that makes mesmerizing leaps of imagination and of time and place as it moves seamlessly between past and present. Tells a powerful story of war and peace, guilt and innocence, suffering and love--and of one man's climb toward salvation.

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Good book, very sad though.

FROM THE PUBLISHER
Jesse Pasadoble, a former infantry soldier who served his country with honor and courage, is now a defense attorney living in San Francisco. It was in Vietnam that Jesse learned to "hate death and to develop an almost anguished love of the living" during a horrific siege in which he should have died but didn't. For Jesse, the battle still rages: in his tortured memories; in the gang wars that are erupting on Potrero Hill; and now, in the cold-blooded execution of two women - one black, one Vietnamese - on the edge of a San Francisco ghetto.

Jesse's defense of the young man accused of the brutal double murder will take him back across the years and miles. Finding the truth will mean weaving together the disparate strands of his own haunted life, as the atrocities of the present day become inextricably linked with a battle that took place on a hilltop on the Laotian border two decades before. It is in this fragile link between the two worlds that Jesse dares to seek his own redemption.

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