Miracle Creek by Angie Kim

 

It was a small business that should have succeeded.  The Yoo family, Korean immigrants, have a hyperbaric chamber housed in an old submarine.  Individuals can go in for an hour long treatment to breathe increased oxygen.  The treatment has been suggested for everything from Lyme disease to infertility to autism treatment.  But something went horribly wrong and a fire trapped the patients inside the chamber.  A mother of five and an eight year old boy are killed, burned alive.  The immigrant father is left paralyzed and his teenage daughter is left scarred and in a coma for several months.

What really happened?  A year later, a murder trial is being held.  Elizabeth, the mother of the child who was killed, is on trial.  The prosecution believes she killed her child to escape the life of a mother with a disabled child.  But was it her?  There are secrets belonging to almost everyone there that day and even some no one knew were there.  Was the fire to hide an affair?  Was it to collect an insurance payment of more than a million dollars?  Was it a different mother who couldn't face their child's disability?  Was it done in anger over a marriage that isn't working out?

This is a debut novel and it has garnered lots of praise.  It won the Edgar Award for Debut Novel and is recommended by many prominent names in the mystery/thriller genre.  The plot twists and turns and the reader is convinced over and over that they know who it is as it turns out that everyone there had a reason to start the fire that ended so tragically.  The author has intimate knowledge of much of the book's subjects.  She is from a Korean-American family and was a former trial attorney.  Readers will be entertained and left interested in seeing what this author will do next.