Now how could I resist this??? The New York Times headline for their review of this book reads “A Novel That’s Equal Parts Murder Mystery, Courtroom Drama and Immigration Tale.”   Okay – gotta do this. I’ve loved mysteries since I discovered Nancy Drew in the 4th grade. I’m a legal crime fan, especially love the courtroom drama parts. And immigration novels have been a bright spot of literary fiction for me for years.  Yup – and there it was waiting at the library (Libby).   

Miracle Creek A Novel
By: Angie Kim / 2019
 Read by Jennifer Lim 14h 5 
 Rating; 8.5-A /  literary- crime 

This debut novel won the Edgar Award and a number of other awards plus it was named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and the Today show.  I kept seeing it as I visited Audible, Amazon and a couple of blogs I read.  I don’t know why I didn’t really check it out further earlier. (I got it from the library.)

The book opens with an explosion and a fire at a health center. Then Chapter 1 takes place in a courtroom where a murder trial about the fire is going on. The chapter ends as the jury returns with a verdict, but not saying what that verdict is. The rest of the book includes a short build-up to the fire after which it changes off between the courtroom, after court, or backstories of various situations, time frames, focus characters and so on

The set-up is intriguing for a who-done-it, but the relationships and difficulties of the characters almost overshadow the mystery  – not quite.

There are a lot of characters many of whom turn out to be suspects. You might want to keep a little list of characters as they appear but I found one already made up at: https://www.bookcompanion.com/miracle_creek_character_list.html

Pak Yoo and his wife, Young Yoo, immigrated from Korea several years prior and set up their own healing business with HBOT, a “hyperbaric oxygen therapy system” which uses a lot of oxygen under pressure which is pushed into large cylinders where reclining patients get their oxygen. These are in real use today:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/hyperbaric-oxygen-therapy/about/pac-20394380

Matt Thompson is a medical doctor being treated for infertility and his wife, the perfectionist Janine is doing a variety of things behind hubby’s back.  There are many other characters, but it’s Elizabeth Ward who is actually on trial for deliberately starting the fire at the HBOT which killed her son, Henry and her good friend Kitt, another mom.  This isn’t counting the “protestors” who are outraged and decry any attempt at all to try to “cure” autism. They march around the center daily.

The patients on the HBOT dive which exploded were the autistic eight-year-old Henry Ward and Kitt, Elizabeth’s friend. 

There’s a lot happening here – there’s the main plot of who started the fire which killed two people and burned the entire business. There’s a whole tangle and theme of immigrant problems in the Yoo family,  There’s the infertility problem of Matt who is pressured by his wife to have a a child. There’s the theme of handicapped children and alternative medicine along with the stresses and work of it. And there’s the difficulty of a single parent raising a child with disabilities.  

Competition and lysing are big time themes. All the relationships seem to have these problems and they aren’t one-time events or only found in one relationship, they’re pervasive. Using other people for your own gain is a theme. Protecting your children super important – how far would you go to protect yours?

This is NOT a simplistic domestic suspense story with some human dilemmas thrown in on the side. There is far more nuance and texture and complex human emotion and depth than that. Meanwhile, tension is woven through it, lightly at first, but building to a multi-faceted ending.  

Good insight – interview – explanation – etc at the Guardian

Book review at the Washington Post (may have a pay wall)

And a good review is at Bookbrowse,– as usual.