Amy Lee's Chinese immigrant family was too poor to keep her older sister, Sylvie, who was raised for a time by a distant relative. Now, grown-up Sylvie has disappeared, and when Amy starts retracing her movements, she finds not her sister but her sister's well-kept secrets. From the New York Times best-selling author Kwok, winner of ALA's Alex Award and the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award.

New York Times best-selling novelist Kwok follows up Mambo in Chinatown and Girl in Translation with an intriguing and gripping mystery. New York City college student Amy Lee opens the narrative by describing the passing of her grandmother a week ago in Amsterdam, where older sister Sylvie had gone to be with the woman who raised her early in her childhood. Mere pages into the work, Amy now learns from their cousin Lukas that Sylvie seems to be missing after having recently returned stateside without her immediate family's knowledge. The voices of Amy, Sylvie, and their mother are interspersed in alternating chapters, with Amy's in the present and Sylvie divulging what went on in her life just months before she vanished. As information seeps out, suspects responsible for Sylvie's disappearance emerge, ranging from her philandering husband to her flirtatious new cello instructor Filip to any of the family members she had been staying with overseas. VERDICT Kwok's tightly woven novel is an emotional and thrilling page-turner that also provides insight into her Asian culture. A major change of pace for Kwok; readers who enjoyed the work of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl should appreciate. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/18.]—Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA

Kwok's thoughtful thriller (after Mambo in Chinatown) explores the Chinese immigrant experience in New York and Amsterdam, as the death of a grandmother leads two sisters to discover secrets about their family's past. Beautiful, high-achieving older sister Sylvie was raised by relatives in the Netherlands until she was nine while her newly emigrated parents tried to make a life for themselves in the U.S. In her 30s, Sylvie returns to say goodbye to her grandmother and becomes romantically involved with both a second cousin to whom she has always been attracted and a mysterious musician. When Sylvie disappears, having told her family in Amsterdam that she is returning to New York, her shy younger sister, Amy, sets off to find out what happened. Amy gets to know the family members she has never met, and begins to formulate theories about what happened to Sylvie. Kwok builds suspense by alternating between the points of view of Sylvie and Amy. The story is at its best when it delineates the struggles of second-generation Chinese immigrants in the two countries, and at its weakest when it falls into swooning romance clichés. Because most readers will solve the mysteries before Amy does, this one will satisfy those interested in the immigrant experience more than those looking for a complex plot to puzzle over. (June)