Sauce for the Gander (An Eddie O'Brien Story)

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My latest Eddie O'Brien, Sauce for the Gander, just came out on Topiary Stories. This time around, Eddie gets hired (independently) by an estranged husband and wife. The results get quickly complicated, indeed!

Reading a draft of this story, a friend of mine was surprised to see a newspaper columnist with a Japanese surname in 1948 Honolulu. I reminded him that, unlike their counterparts on the mainland, Japanese-Americans in the islands were not mass interred during WWII. To do so would have been to cripple the local economy since, at that time, they made up nearly one-half of the workforce. Many Japanese-Americans, therefore, maintained their freedom and jobs in Hawaii. Incarceration was highly selective and, no surprise, it often followed socio-economic lines with the less privileged suffering disproportionally.

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