Those Opulent Days
A Mystery
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Both a complex murder mystery and a lush historical novel, this is an instantly compelling read. One evening in 1928 in what’s now Vietnam (but was then a French colony called Annam), four young men gather. Duy, Phong, Minh, and Edmond are lifelong friends from wealthy families, all newly installed in their family businesses. By midnight, one of them will die. From that opening, author Jacquie Pham brings us into the preceding week, telling the story from multiple points of view, including not just the friends themselves but also their family members, servants, and others in their orbit. A story of wealth, indulgence, and the racism, sexism, and violence that prop up colonialism, this is a novel where no one’s hands are entirely clean—or completely dirty. Pham has done her historical research, but what sticks is her detailed and transportive descriptions of both the elegance and ugliness of the era. Those Opulent Days is a remarkable debut.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pham debuts with a memorable and disturbing historical set in French-occupied Vietnam. In 1918, four wealthy boys—native Annamites Duy, Phong, and Minh, and Frenchman Edmond—steal away from their boarding school to visit a fortune teller who warns that one of them will die by poison. A decade later, after the boys have grown into formidable businessmen, one of them dies such a death, at a debaucherous party in an extravagant Dalat mansion. From there, the narrative splinters, with flashbacks from each protagonist's perspective buttressed by recollections from their employees, lovers, and mothers that give gradual context to the central tragedy. What emerges is less a traditional mystery than a bleak portrait of life under colonization, with special focus on the ill treatment of women and animals by elites, and the spiritual hopelessness that saturates their ranks: even Phong, the most brilliant and promising of the friends, abandons his studies to smoke Duy's family's opium and pursue a doomed love affair with Edmond. Pham's prose is lyrical, and her evocation of the period immersive, but the sprawling cast means some secondary characters don't quite come to life. Still, this is a tense and unique dispatch from a key period in Vietnamese history.
