The Nine-Layer Lie

Some men wear a borrowed name for a season. He wore his for fifty-two years.

Kee Sook Lin came to Malacca to sit with an old friend who couldn't sleep. She did not come looking for a case.

When Dr. Michelle Tan asks the retired clinical pharmacist to quietly review the death of a beloved kueh shop owner - a death the hospital has already ruled natural, closed, nothing to find - Sook Lin expects to reassure her friend and go home.
Instead, she finds a medical chart too clean to be innocent, a billfold that has carried the same hidden shape for half a century, and a family living above an old Peranakan shophouse who have never once heard their father's real name.

The trail leads back fifty-two years, to a drowning no one thought to question, and to a promise kept so completely that even the people who loved him longest never knew there was anything left to keep.

Set among the shophouses, hawker stalls and Nyonya kitchens of historic Malacca, Malaysia. The Nine-Layer Lie is a warm, twisty cozy mystery for readers who like their whodunits gentle, their food real, and their detectives old enough to know better.

Madam Kee Mysteries - a Malaysian culinary cozy series.
Each book stands alone. Best read in order.