One formula frequently applied to the mystery novel involves adoptees who reach adulthood and seek to track down their birth parents. This understandably can create problems for people who don't wish to be found, and sometimes their efforts at evasion lead to murder. The master of this genre was the late Canadian-American author Kenneth Millar (1915-83), who wrote under the nom de plume of Ross MacDonald.
The two works received here involve the search for identity by the grownup daughters of black U.S. servicemen and Asian mothers. Read together they give some interesting insights into how two writers can adopt very different approaches.
Although set in 1980, "Country of Origin" seems to have borrowed a cue from a recent true crime -- the case of former British Airways stewardess Lucie Blackman, who was fatally drugged in July 2000 while dating a customer of the Roppongi club where she worked.