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 night and 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, and well-kept secrets begins to unravel.

As the story creeps closer to the murder, and as each character becomes a suspect, the true villain begins to emerge: colonialism, the French occupation of Vietnam, and 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 and a classically structured, pitch-perfect murder mystery featuring a robust cast of characters you won't soon forget.

Author: Jacquie Pham
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 11/12/2024
Pages: 304
Weight: 1lbs
Size: 9.10h x 5.90w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780802163806


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 06/01/2024 pg. 5
Publishers Weekly 09/09/2024
Kirkus Reviews 10/01/2024
Booklist 10/01/2024 pg. 26

About the Author
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. She currently lives in Sydney with two very goofy dogs. Don't tell them, but Jacquie also loves cats.