Those Opulent Days

Jacquie Pham's transportive debut, Those Opulent Days, delivers a classic historical murder mystery centered around the glamor, violence, wealth, & opium of 1920's French-colonial Vietnam that meshes the structural brilliance of Lucy Foley's The Guest List with the historical vitality of Vanessa Chan's The Storm We Made, & the upstairs-downstairs drama of Downton Abbey.One will lose his mind. One will pay. One will agonize. And one will die.Duy, Phong, Minh, & Edmond have been best friends since childhood. Now, as young men running their families' formidable businesses, they make up Saigon's most powerful group of friends in 1928 Vietnam's elite society.Until one of them is murdered.In a lavish mansion on a hill in Dalat, all four men have gathered for an evening of indulgence, but one of them won't survive the night. Toggling between this fatal night & the six days leading up to it, told from the perspectives of the four men, their mothers, their servants, and their lovers, an intricate web of terror, loyalty, & well-kept secrets begins to unravel.As the story creeps closer to the murder, & as each character becomes a suspect, the true villain begins to emerge: colonialism, the French occupation of Vietnam, & the massive economic differences that catapult the wealthy into the stratosphere while the poor starve on the streets.Those Opulent Days is at once both a historical novel of vivid intensity & a classically structured, pitch-perfect murder mystery featuring a robust cast of characters you won’t soon forget.°°°Jacquie Pham is a Vietnamese-Australian writer of adult fiction. Growing up in Vietnam during the New Korean wave around 2007, Jacquie started writing short stories about Korean boy bands. She then moved to Australia to attend the University of Sydney—not wanting to let 13-year-old Jacquie down, she has decided to pursue a career as an author.jacquiepham.com Jacquie Pham's transportive debut, Those Opulent Days , delivers a classic historical murder mystery centered around the glamor, violence, wealth, and opium of 1920's French-colonial Vietnam that meshes the structural brilliance of Lucy Foley's The Guest List with the historical vitality of Vanessa Chan's The Storm We Made , and the upstairs-downstairs drama of Downton Abbey . One will lose his mind. One will pay. One will agonize. And one will die. Duy, Phong, Minh, and Edmond have been best friends since childhood. Now, as young men running their families' formidable businesses, they make up Saigon's most powerful group of friends in 1928 Vietnam's elite society. Until one of them is murdered. In a lavish mansion on a hill in Dalat, all four men have gathered for an evening of indulgence, but one of them won't survive the night. Toggling between this fatal...