chinatown

Miranda Corbie is a San Francisco private investigator circa 1940. She smokes. She drinks. She plays hardball. She is a female Sam Spade. City Of Dragons begins on Chinese New Year. San Francisco is hosting a "Rice Bowl Party" to raise money for war relief in China. The tale starts with a bang: “Miranda didn’t hear the sound he made when his face hit the sidewalk.”

Eddie Takahashi was a Japanese punk and a mobster-wanna-be. No one wants his death investigated. Miranda is warned off by the police and Italian and Japanese mobsters as well as her own friends. Despite it all, she remains

Along with the long-forgotten contents of the basement of the Panama Hotel, Henry Lee’s memories of 1940’s Seattle are unearthed.  When new hotel owners start to renovate the boarded up, old Japanese-designed building they discover the personal belongings of numerous Japanese families who were interned during WWII. As a resident of Seattle’s Chinatown, just the other side of the Panama Hotel from Japantown, Henry witnessed first-hand the removal of the Japanese. His friendship with a Japanese classmate leads him to hold a special interest in the dusty belongings of one family in particular