The Second It All Changed

It’s the American south so you would expect a certain amount of racial tension, but between Chinese and Japanese? Crocodiles in Florida? What’s that got to do with a missing baby?

It’s the American south, so you would expect a certain amount of racial tension, but between Chinese and Japanese? Fleeing a bad marriage, Suzy, a young Japanese-American mother thought she was safe as she hid in the sleepy central Florida town of Clear Springs. Then her baby, Akira, is kidnapped. The local, Sheriff’s Office, understaffed and underfunded is making no progress in finding the missing baby. Desperate, Susie teams up with William, a disconnected man trying to put his life back together. With his help, pieces to the puzzle slowly come into focus. Did her ex-husband, dogged by his tyrannical father take the baby, heir to a powerful crime family, back to Japan? Is the mysterious Zylontronic Processing Company a front for something far more sinister? It doesn’t take Suzy long to realize her Yakuza connected ex is not the only thing she needs to worry about. Her frantic search reveals racial hatred, heartbreaking exploitation and terrible anger she never imagined. Suzy’s parents had only hinted at the tension between Chinese and Japanese. If they had elaborated, Suzy might understand how Akira became the key to unlocking a decades old grudge, growing out of 1937 Nanking, involving ‘ukiyo-e yokai’, the beast of the floating world. The journey to find her son, takes her places she never believed could exist right around the corner from the sunny tourist havens of Florida. She soon realizes that dogged persistence and her new-found friends are the only hope of finding her baby alive.

Robert C. Frink is a psycho-anthropological writer born and raised in Central Florida. His travels around the world including forays into Japan and China stimulated his interest in the cultures of the two great nations. But it was not until he moved to the Portland, Oregon that he discovered that the similarities masked animosities and deep mistrust brewing for decades before the United States entered World War II. In addition to writing this first of the Clear Springs Series, Mr. Frink has written a series of short stories called Bizarre Travel Books (bizarretravelbooks.com). Each story a twisted tale from some dark corner of the world, unpredictable and uncanny, crafted to entertain and enlighten.