Al Dawson
Searching For NORIKO BY AL DAWSON
Frankie Castillo spent fifty years carrying a promise he made in wartime. He honored his life in the years that followed. Built a family. Built a career. But the promise remained, and the woman he made it to remained lost somewhere in Japan.
When Frankie crosses the Pacific to find Noriko, what begins as a personal reckoning becomes something far more dangerous. A clash between criminal organizations in Japan and North Korean agents pulls him into a crisis he did not ask for and cannot leave behind.
Searching for Noriko is a story about what we owe the people we failed in the moments that defined us, and what it costs to finally make it right.
Winner of Second Place, New Novel Category, Palm Beach Book Festival. Published by Adelaide Books, 2021.
- An American G.I , veteran of Okinawa, worries about the stability of his marriage. He is haunted by memories of a woman he rescued and wronged in 1945.
- A Japanese beauty is conflicted about a planned reunion with a former lover in New York.
- A collusion between criminal gangs in Japan and North Korean agents threatens to spiral into an international crisis.
- What begins as a search for closure becomes a reckoning with the choices that shaped an entire lifetime.
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In his final journey, Frankie discovers that redemption often demands more than confession.
It requires courage.
356
Pages
Kindle
Edition
2605
Sales
our author
Al Dawson is a retired regulatory lawyer who spent his career inside the institutions his fiction examines: the Church, the courtroom, the regulatory apparatus. He understands how they work. And how they fail the people who trusted them.
His novels are built from that knowledge. Searching for Noriko (2021) earned second place at the Palm Beach Book Festival. Priest (2024) won Gold, First Place for Adult Fiction at the 2025 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Borderlines (2026) continues the moral universe he has been building since his first novel.
He lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida with his wife Jane. He publishes under Luna del Lobo Books.
Searching for Noriko is the first novel in Al Dawson’s catalog. Continue with Priest, the second book, or explore the full catalog at lunadellobo.com.
" ODYSSEY "
A fifty-year reckoning that crosses an ocean, two cultures, and the distance between the soldier Frankie was and the man he needed to become.
" EXPLORATION "
Into the aftermath of Okinawa, the streets of modern Japan, and the space between guilt and redemption where Frankie has lived his entire adult life.
" THE CRAFT "
A novel that moves between wartime memory and present danger, written with the historical precision and emotional depth that earned second place at the Palm Beach Book Festival.
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