The Sixth Name

Some debts are paid in blood. This one was supposed to be paid in truth - until Minh Tran found out how many people would suffer for the difference.

In August 1974, six American soldiers came to a village in Quảng Ngãi Province and did something so unspeakable that three sisters would spend the rest of their lives paying for one night. One of the six left something else behind: a son.

Thirty years later, Dr. Minh Tran is a forensic scientist with the patience of a man who has spent his whole life waiting for one specific kind of proof. He has a photograph. He has six names. And he has spent four years turning both into six DNA profiles, one of which, he knows, will match his own.

One by one, the men who destroyed his mother's family start dying. A gun collector in Pennsylvania. A corrections officer in Texas. A preacher who has spent thirty years asking a god he isn't sure exists for a forgiveness he was never going to get from Minh. Each death reads differently to the investigators chasing it, an accident, a suicide, a heart that simply gives out - and each one brings Minh one name closer to the only question that has ever actually mattered: which of the six is his father.

When the DNA results finally answer it, they hand Minh something worse than a name to kill. They hand him a sitting governor three weeks from a Senate election - and a choice that four years of careful planning never prepared him to make.

THE SIXTH NAME is a story about inheritance: of blood, of silence, and of exactly how much of a war a son is required to finish.
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