Diamond Raiders: Mount Kumgang Mystery by Mae Adams
Mount Kumgang was a sacred place for many centuries. In the 7th century, the Silla Kingdom built a captivating Buddhist Temple resembling the House of Three Gods, defined as Heaven, Earth, and the God of Ancestors. Every poet and artist made an extraordinary journey to paint watercolors and write verses. The World War II division of the country in 1945 stopped the South Koreans from visiting these cherished mountains for many years. The 155-mile-long barbed-wire fence erected as part of the Demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas after the War proved to be an obstruction deadlier than any other barrier.
Numerous folk tales, myths, and legends connected to Mount Kumgang delighted people for many generations. But the story in this book is concerned with raiders of diamonds from the Temple during the Japanese occupation of 35 years, where no Korean police existed, and the Japanese police controlled all the crimes in the country. However, it was the natural law that anyone raiding things from a sacred place had to pay the price. How to identify the raiders and what price the raiders had to pay was anyone’s guess. The gentle Koreans seldom engaged in murder, although they could be hot-headed to butt their heads first and shake hands later. Thus, identifying guilty people was extremely difficult.
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Author Bio:
Mae Adams was born in Korea in 1933 to an aristocratic family who retreated to a mountain village when the Japanese invaded Korea in 1910. Born as the useless second daughter, not a son, her mother abandoned Mae, and her grandparents raised her.
Despite attending schools run by the Japanese, her upper-class grandparents raised her to achieve their expectations to meet her standing in Korean society. Her “homeschooling” included exposure to the philosophies fundamental to Korean culture. At the end of World War II, her family escaped from the Communist regime that took over her hometown. Her grandma stayed behind to give the family enough time to escape.
Within five years, her family survived the chaos of the Korean War, and Mae became the breadwinner of her family and dreamed of going to America to get a college education.
She met the man of her dreams, Hewitt Dayne Adams, an American Marine Corps Colonel, but left him to pursue her education. She continued a long-distance romance with Hewitt for three years until she married him, raised a family, and ran a successful business.
The Letters/A Lifetime Foreign Affair came from it.
After retiring from the Marine Corps, Hewitt returned to school, got his degree, and became a professor at Clemson University, teaching Asian and American history. Mae, fluent in four languages, taught him Chinese, which is a required course.
After his second retirement, Hewitt wanted to write Mae’s life story, but his many ailments interrupted him. Mae was his sole caregiver for the last thirteen years of his life. After forty-three years together, Hewitt lost his battle with cancer. While grieving, Mae wrote Precious Silver Chopsticks for publication. Her second book is Coin for a Dream. Her latest book is Diamond Raiders: Mount Kumgang Mystery.
Mae lives near her daughter’s family in McCormick, SC, USA.