My friend Melissa recommended this to me a while ago, and I finally got around to it since the library has volume one. I'll definitely be picking up volume two!

The Good Asian is a noir set in 1930s San Francisco Chinatown, following Honolulu cop Edison Hark who's come to the mainland at the request of an old family friend. As the last decade before the Chinese Exclusion Act dropped, tensions run high, and an American-born generation struggles with xenophobia from the country of their birth. A lot of the historical background is in my wheel house, but I love setting this in the 1930s (as I feel like a lot of historical fiction about Chinese Americans skews towards late 1800s or post-1965). My own great-grandmother came in the 1920s, so it's startling to consider that Yeh-yeh would've been the age of one of the kids Edison talks to.

The creators definitely did their homework, and I'll be seeking out more of their work. ( )

Good grief, this is fantastic. Noir is such a stereotypical whites-only genre and Pichetshote uses it to magnificently depict the alienation lived by immigrants both then and now. ( )

A historical fiction for which the historical end notes are much more interesting than the flat and dreary crime noir mystery that makes up the majority of the book. A Chinese American police detective from Honolulu, Edison Hark, has been called to San Francisco by the son of a white millionaire who has fallen into a coma out of despair over the disappearance of the Chinese maid with whom he has a relationship. In the course of his investigation, Hark also gets mixed up in the possible return of tong violence and the racist backlash that could possibly ignite in the police and white communities around Chinatown.

Hark's voice-over narration is dour, cynical, and full of self-loathing. It just ground me down and made me care less and less as the story progressed. There's a cliffhanger ending, and the concluding volume comes out in a few months, but I'm not sure I'll bother. ( )