DEATH AVENUE

In Jung’s historical novel, a man returns from the Great War to New York to find a violent city, an inhospitable family, and a murder to solve.

Eddie returns to Chinatown after having driven for the Red Cross in France during World War I. He is less than hospitably received by his Chinese father, Fuunwong, and brother, Clock. Eddie is mixed-race and passes for white, a dangerously ambiguous identity during a time of extraordinary racial prejudice. In this gripping novel, Eddie’s predicament is deftly portrayed: “Both sides of his family had made it clear to Eddie that he had to keep the facts of his background a secret. To the rest of the world, Eddie was a mongrel, a half-breed, a cur. Eddie isn’t a man. he is a gray area in a world that doesn’t like gray areas.” Eddie finds a dead Chinese man on 10th Avenue, his body so mangled that it’s clear he was dragged by a train to his death. Eddie suspects the man was murdered—his face looks like “he had been betrayed”—and uses the notebook he finds on his person to discover his name: the man is Ah Fay, a local actor. Strangely, Eddie’s father and brother want that notebook as well, though they are reluctant to disclose why (given their criminal activities, he suspects nefarious motives). The author’s writing cleverly pays homage to the hardboiled detective noir fiction of the 20th century—his prose is punchy and brimming with a hard-earned cynicism. New York City is memorably captured as simultaneously a place of great squalor and hope. Jung masterfully presents the reader with complex moral entanglements and even more impressively resists the facile allure of any contrived solutions to them. Eddie is a man of irresolvable contradictions and a mesmerizingly nuanced protagonist.

A deeply intriguing novel, emotionally powerful and unburdened by cheap sentimentality.