A stranger in a black mask rings the doorbell, says two words to a thirteen‑year‑old boy, and shoots him.
"The camp."
Dr. Ken Bell knows what the words mean. Nearly twenty years ago, in the bamboo hospital of the Khao‑I‑Dang refugee camp on the Thai border, he was a young volunteer doctor and Mony was the Cambodian refugee assigned as his interpreter. She had survived the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. They fell in love, married, and built a life as two physicians outside Boston.
Now someone has followed them from the camp.
Their son survives. The attacks do not stop. The family dog is poisoned. Mony's clinic is firebombed. Her sister is murdered on the walk home from the night shift.
Someone calls their eight‑year‑old daughter's name from outside the school fence.
Mony buys a gun. She makes late‑night calls in Khmer. And she will not tell her husband what happened to her in Cambodia.
To save his children, Ken has to learn the truth about the woman he married. It begins in Phnom Penh in April 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge emptied the city.
A dual‑timeline medical thriller of historical suspense, moving between two doctors' lives in 1999 Massachusetts, the Cambodian genocide and a refugee camp hospital on the Thai border, from an author who worked as a physician at Khao‑I‑Dang.
Perfect for readers of Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan and Kristin Harmel's The Book of Lost Names.
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