My Success Story Interview on Query Tracker

Alison McMahan:
The book is a mystery/police procedural set in Long Beach, CA, in 1990, a time when Cambodian refugees were arriving en masse. Some brought their skills at guerrilla warfare, which helped them challenge the established Mexican and Chicano gangs for turf, leading to a decade of gang warfare.
One of these Cambodians is Thavary Keo. She fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia when she was a child and was fostered by a social worker and a cop in Long Beach. Now she's twenty-six, a beat cop in a city threatened by the escalating gang war. She’s driven to find out which gang was behind a drive-by shooting that killed an entire family, but she is just a rookie, one of the first hired to diversify the force. She's partnered with the only other LBPD minority officer, Mexican American Carlos Urrieta. They don’t trust each other, but both want to stop the gang war. The book gives each police officer their own perspective.

I was inspired by my experiences making two documentaries in Cambodia in 2004-2010. I was editing in Anaheim, CA, and would sometimes drive to Long Beach to pick up a Khmer interpreter who could help me make sure I didn't cut a bit of Khmer dialogue in the middle of a sentence. My interpreter was a refugee, and I wondered about his life. Thavary is loosely based on the lead figure in my documentaries, although I made the character female. The thematic question I ask about Thavary is, how does a Theravada Buddhist police officer reconcile using a gun as part of her job?
I went to high school in Anaheim for a year. Carlos Urrieta is partly inspired by the Chicano kids at my high school.