As Anne’s drinks from a Japanese tea cup, its crack filled in with gold, a Japanese tradition that honors past wounds, she thinks that “if people were repaired the same way; foreheads etched with brass hairline fractures, chips of silver embedded along fingers, bolts of gold shot through hearts, then we would know the places to be careful with." And these are the places she will be forced to go.
Anne's twin sister, Suz, is the family idealist and saint who ran off to South Africa to help the poor, Anne is the pragmatic twin who started a coffee house in Portland, Oregon. When Suz comes home for Christmas and disappears, Anne resorts to tactics such as ‘syncing’ to her twin like they did as children, and reading through Suz’s journal, which reveals not only the lives of a township family but secrets her sister has kept from her. Anne's desperate search turns her world upside down and inside out, along with the labels of 'saint' and 'sinner'.
A fast-paced literary mystery that will take you from Portland to Johannesburg to Mexico while it exposes the reader to both the light and darkness burning within human nature.