Book Title: Snow Angels in the Dust
Author and Publisher: Kristoffer Gair
Cover Artist: Kris Norris
Release Date: August 27, 2024
Genre: LGBT, Romance
Tropes: Quest, Fated Mates
Themes: Forgiveness, Fate, Asian culture
Heat Rating: One sex scene/ 4 out of 5 flames.
Length: 73 000 words/ 336 pages
It is its own self-contained story,
but features characters from Butterflies I Have Known, and Falling Awake III: Requiem.
It does not end on a cliffhanger
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As it should be. As it needs to be. As it was meant to be.
Blurb
“I have one more job for you.”
Milton Glass, an award-winning photojournalist, celebrated worldwide as one of the greatest documentarians of the twentieth century, has passed. However, he leaves an unfinished task for personal assistant Cristian Orr (Butterflies I Have Known): discover the fate of a soldier’s child who’d been born and abandoned during the Vietnam War.
Cristian hesitates to get involved until an even greater mystery presents itself in the form of a name uttered over thirty years earlier by a comatose man on the other side of the world.
A name no one there could possibly know.
In an unfamiliar country and completely out of his element, Cristian must uncover the life of a man born of two cultures, accepted by neither, and the man’s connection to the whispered name.
The answers draw Cristian into a personal journey unlike anything he’s experienced before, towards a fate two lifetimes in the making.
Cristian continued to nibble on his sub while he perused the rest of the contents inside the box, stopping from time to time to change laundry over and refill his glass of water. Most anyone who read the letters from Hai Anh Nguyen to Master Sergeant Dale Ricci would most certainly sentence the man to eternal damnation. Cristian understood that impulse all too well, but he also knew enough in terms of the job in front of him to examine everything dispassionately and look for clues.
Still, wading into a situation like this didn’t appeal to him. This constituted someone else’s business, not his. The likelihood of him doing any good here didn’t feel promising enough to take the risk.
There’d been a backlash. Vietnamese society—as it was during those years, and not that the United States was any better—ostracized the children born to Caucasian fathers and Vietnamese mothers. Cristian could almost hear her voice in his mind, full of fear. Her tone pleaded now, yet still never asked that Dale take them to the United States. No. She felt certain his presence there alone would stop anything bad from happening to them. Finally, after nearly a year of letters, she feared Dale either dead or no longer interested in her and their child, something she expressed she didn’t understand.
There were fourteen letters, each spaced a month apart, and then one more, twenty-two years later.
Dale,
I pray this letter finds you. Not for my sake, but for Khanh. I can only think you have forgotten us, and while I accept you forgetting me, you should know about Khanh. He is your flesh and blood. Do not concern yourself about my life. I have learned to live with how things are, and they are partially my doing for making the decision to be with you when you were here. But it is not Khanh’s fault for being born.
The way he and others like him have been treated is worse than anything you can imagine. Those around us barely consider him human, and he is. Khanh is the sweetest boy, and very hardworking. You would be proud of him.
People here have made problems for him in the past. They have called him names, hit him, spit on him, and made much trouble. Three men, a father and his two sons, beat Khanh three nights ago on his way home from work, and left him by the side of the road. The police took him to the hospital where, except for one brief moment, he has been in a coma. The doctors say he may not wake up again.
You were not there when Khanh was born, and you have not been there in his life. I ask you to come to him now, and talk to him. He will hear your voice, listen to you, and know his father does love and care about him. Please give him that. You don’t have to see me. Just see your son.
Please.
I don’t know if this will mean anything to you, but the morning after he arrived at the hospital, I was holding his hand when he opened his eyes and whispered a name. I don’t know this person, or where Khanh may have heard it. Nobody knows, and he has not woken up again since. Do you know the name Noah Laughty? Do you know who this person is and why he is so important that our son spoke his name?
Khanh may not have much time left, and he waits to see you. Please come to him.
Hai Anh
Cristian knocked his chair over dashing for the bathroom. He didn’t have a chance in hell of lifting the toilet seat before the inevitable happened, so he leaned into the shower stall and every bit of his sub sandwich shot back up his throat and out onto the tile below.
So much for cool as steel.
He retched for a solid thirty seconds, then slowly sunk to his knees, his energy completely sapped. Nothing left to vomit either. Just the bitter taste of the last twenty-four hours, the passing of Milton Glass, dealing with a lawyer who knew more than she should, and now this. The name. The name that shouldn’t be, that couldn’t be.
How was it possible someone thirty-two years ago on the other side of the world spoke that name?
How?
Kristoffer Gair grew up in Fraser, MI and is a graduate of Grand Valley State University.
He currently lives in a suburb of Detroit.
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