Miracle Creek

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was impressed by the depth and breadth of this mystery/trial story. A hyperbaric chamber has been blown up with patients inside, resulting in death. The problem is nothing is at it seems. Kim does a credible job of convincing the reader of the guilt of one character only to reveal some new secret that changes points to a whole new suspect or discredits all the previous assumptions. But besides being a great crime drama, Kim also explores issues such as immigration, fertility, racism, and sexual exploitation. She tackles autism and other disabilities and the challenges of being a parent of a nontypical child--the exhaustion, the guilt, the frustration, the relentlessness of it. But she also captures the community that can spring up among those experiencing the same difficulties--the support and also some of the competition and envy. But she also ties in how hard it is to just be a parent, how you show love and how kids recognize it (or not).

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But what he hadn't known, hadn't expected, was that this linguistic uncertainty would extend beyond speech, and like a virus, infect other parts: his thinking, demeanor, his very personality itself.  In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect.  In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept.

Good things and bad--every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness--resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.