"This complex and very timely story is a riveting study of greed and betrayal." —BooklistRick van Lam is bui doi, "a child of dust," as the Vietnamese scornfully called a mixed-blood kid whose father was an unknown American GI. But Rick was lucky—in time he was sent to America. And he's ended up in Hartford, Connecticut, where he's made a life as a private eye after leaving a career as a cop at the NYPD.Rick is also teaching a part-time course at Farmington College where brainy Vietnamese student Dustin Trang, a scholarship student with no social skills and an oddly hostile family, is scorned and bullied. It reminds Rick of his own miserable days in a Saigon orphanage and he reaches out. But Dustin rebuffs him.One night as a blizzard strikes, a professor is shot down in the campus parking lot. The man had befriended Dustin, but their relationship had visibly soured. Dustin is everyone's hot suspect for the murder, but Rick believes the boy is innocent. Oddly, Dustin seems indifferent t