Naomi Hirahara
1) Evergreen
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Japantown mystery volume 2
Description
"Los Angeles, 1946: It's been two years since Aki Ito and her family were released from Manzanar detention center and resettled in Chicago with other Japanese Americans. Now the Itos have finally been allowed to return home to California--but nothing is as they left it. The entire Japanese American community is starting from scratch, with thousands of people living in dismal refugee camps while they struggle to find new houses and jobs in over-crowded...
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"Bike cop Ellie Rush dreams of becoming a homicide detective, but it's still a shock when the first dead body she encounters on the job is that of a former college classmate. At the behest of her Aunt Cheryl, the highest-ranking Asian-American officer in the LAPD (a source of pride for Ellie's grandmother, but annoyance to her mom), Ellie becomes tangled in the investigation of the coed's murder--with equal parts help and hindrance from her nosy best...
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Mas Arai mystery volume 7
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"In the seventh and final of the award-winning Mas Arai series, retired L.A. gardener Mas returns to Hiroshima to bring his best friend's ashes to a relative on a small island, only to be embroiled in the mysterious death of a teenage boy who was about the same age as Mas when he survived the atomic bomb in 1945"--
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LAPD bicycle cop—and aspiring homicide detective—Ellie Rush is back on patrol in the newest mystery from the award-winning author of Murder on Bamboo Lane and the Japantown Mysteries.
Ellie stops for a friendly chat with gardener Eduardo Fuentes while patrolling one of Los Angeles’s premier concert halls. A few minutes later she’s shocked to discover him lying at the bottom of a staircase,...
Ellie stops for a friendly chat with gardener Eduardo Fuentes while patrolling one of Los Angeles’s premier concert halls. A few minutes later she’s shocked to discover him lying at the bottom of a staircase,...
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In the foothills of Pasadena, Mas Arai is just another Japanese-American gardener, his lawnmower blades clean and sharp, his truck carefully tuned. But while Mas keeps lawns neatly trimmed, his own life has gone to seed. His wife is dead. And his livelihood is falling into the hands of the men he once hired by the day. For Mas, a life of sin is catching up to him. And now bachi—the spirit of retribution—is knocking on his door.
It begins...
It begins...
6) Blood Hina
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Mas Arai's best friend Haruo is getting married, and the cranky detective and semi-retired gardener has grudgingly agreed to serve as best man. But when the ancient Japanese doll display that belongs to Haruo's fiancée goes missing, the wedding is called off with fingers pointed at Haruo. To save his friend's life, Mas must untangle a web of secrecy, heartbreaking memories, and murder stretching from the internment camps of the 1940s through the...
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The Japanese American detective's most engaging mystery yet delves into baseball, WWII, and the complex history between Japan and Korea. At Dodger Stadium, Japan is playing Korea in the World Baseball Classic, but before the first pitch is thrown, Mas Arai finds himself investigating a murder. Mystery, history, and cultural conflict form a dangerous web in this riveting chapter in the Edgar Award-winning series featuring the most unlikely of sleuths-an...
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From the editor of the award-winning Children of Manzanar, Heather C. Lindquist, and Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara comes a nuanced account of the "Resettlement": the relatively unexamined period when ordinary people of Japanese ancestry, having been unjustly imprisoned during World War II, were finally released from custody. Given twenty-five dollars and a one-way bus ticket to make a new life, some ventured east to Denver and Chicago to start...
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Japantown mystery volume 1
Description
"Chicago, 1944: Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new...
10) Iced in paradise
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Leilani Santiago Hawai'i mystery volume 1
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"Leilani Santiago is back in her birthplace, the Hawaiian island of Kaua'i, to help keep afloat the family business, a shave ice shack. When she goes to work one morning, she stumbles across a dead body, a young pro surfer who was being coached by her estranged father. As her father soon becomes the No. 1 murder suspect, Leilani must find the real killer and somehow safeguard her ill mother, little sisters, and grandmother while also preserving a...
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Strawberry Yellow is set in the strawberry fields of Watsonville, California, where young Mas first arrived from Hiroshima in the 1940s. Now a retired gardener who lives in an L.A. suburb, he returns for the funeral of a cousin and quickly gets entangled in the murder of a young woman. Was his cousin murdered, too? Mas has to figure out what happened, keep himself safe in the face of considerable peril, and uncover the mystery of the Strawberry Yellow...
12) An eternal lei
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"It's the middle of the pandemic and Hawai'i has been virtually closed to tourists. So when Leilani Santiago and her young sisters save a mysterious woman wearing a lei from drowning in Waimea Bay in Kaua'i questions abound: who is she and where did she come from? The lei, which is made of mokihana berries, the official flower of Kaua'i, is traced back to Leilani's best friend, the very pregnant Courtney Kahuakai, and her family's flower business....
14) We are here: 30 inspiring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who have shaped the United States
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"There are more than 23 million people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent living in the United States. Their stories span across generations, as well as across the world. We Are Here highlights Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the impact they've had on the cultural, social, and political fabric of the United States."--
15) 1001 cranes
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With her parents on the verge of separating, a devastated twelve-year-old Japanese American girl spends the summer in Los Angeles with her grandparents, where she folds paper cranes into wedding displays, becomes involved with a young skateboarder, and learns how complicated relationships can be.
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This volume collects issues 145-151 of the Dark Horse comic book series Usagi Yojimbo Volume Three, originally published from May 2015 through January 2016.
"Stan Sakai's samurai masterpiece returns in full force! In this volume, Miyamoto Usagi joins forces with a thief and a samurai to thwart a black market Ginseng trade; meets a fellow ronin who lost his arm in a duel, yet still has a trick up his sleeve; helps a tirelessly loyal samurai protect...
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"The latest entry in Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger's popular Sherlock Holmes-inspired mystery series, featuring fifteen talented authors and a multitude of new cases for Arthur Conan Doyle's most acclaimed detective. Sherlock Holmes has not only captivated readers for more than a century and a quarter, he has fascinated writers as well. Almost immediately, the detective's genius, mastery, and heroism became the standard by which other creators...
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"An anniversary can honor many things: a birth, a wedding and sometimes even a death. In Deadly Anniversaries, editors Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini present new stories from some of the best contemporary authors to honor the diamond jubilee of the Mystery Writers of America, an organization founded on the principle that 'Crime Doesn't Pay--Enough.' Each author puts their own unique spin on what it means to recognize a certain day or event each year....
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"The newest anthology from Mystery Writers of America explores the theme of home and the crimes that endanger it, with stories by Ellen Hart, Naomi Hirahara, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky and more. Everyone comes from someplace. Everyone has somewhere they feel safe. Some people have found their home and are content where they are. Others feel trapped and yearn to go somewhere else. Many are somewhere else and yearn to go back. But even in these safest...
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It's no secret that authors have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. The oft-repeated cliché that "the book was better than the movie" holds true for more reasons than the average reader will ever know. When asked about selling their book rights to Hollywood authors like to joke that they drive their manuscripts to the border of Arizona and California and toss them over the fence, driving back the way they came at breakneck speed. This is
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