A Hard Light

Unfinished business has a way of catching up to us when we least expect it. Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen finds that loose ends may be deadly. For years, through the lens of her video camera, Maggie has looked, without flinching, at the mean streets of Los Angeles. But taking a hard look inside her own heart proves to be more difficult, and more dangerous. Maggie's past catches up to her when a beautiful Vietnamese expatriate named Khanh Nguyen asks for help finding a man. Her only link with the Vietnamese community is the one person she won't touch with a ten-foot pole - her ex-husband Scotty. But the progress on her film project is stalled, and Maggie needs a distraction while she ponders the course of the rest of her life: facing the "M" words, as in Marriage to Mike Flint, her L.A.P.D. homicide detective lover; and Moving, when someone offers to buy the house she left behind in San Francisco. So Maggie says yes to Khanh's plan. Khanh's missing person is Bao Ngo, a scholar who escaped from Vietnam at the end of the war but immediately disappeared. When Bao Ngo left Vietnam twenty years ago, a fortune in art vanished too, and now the web of intrigue, lies, and betrayals - intricately spun for two decades - is about to trap anyone it touches: Maggie and her daughter Casey, her ex-husband Scotty, and Khanh. The closer Maggie gets to Bao and the missing treasure, the closer she gets to a truth she would rather not know.


Genre: Mystery