Teresa, nicknamed Mother Teresa for her squeaky clean image, wishes the trial would last longer because it gives her time away from her daughter. Elizabeth, who may or may not have killed her son Henry, finds herself on trial but liberated of a responsibility she increasingly resented. But for Kim, the explosion was “a Trojan horse, a MacGuffin” that gave her space to explore deeper issues: the identity crisis among migrants in the US, the realities of severe autism and chronic illness, and the extremes of parental sacrifice.

As new details are unearthed by shark-like lawyers, characters go from “hero to murderer in an hour” and the truth becomes more and more unfixed as gossip spreads in the small town. Her debut thriller Miracle Creek centres on that relativity, and the explosion of a HBOT tank, which injures many and kills two, one being Henry, a severely autistic boy. It made me have such a totally different outlook on life, the relativity of happiness.” So I felt really sorry for us until I met these families, who were so upbeat. I couldn’t work because of all the CT scans, MRIs and specialist cooking I needed to do. My other son had anaphylactic food allergies. “That son was also deaf in one ear and had coeliac disease. “I had always thought of myself and my family as the unlucky ones,” the author, now 50, says. She began to feel guilty: though her son was in pain, the other children were mostly severely autistic or disabled and for their parents, HBOT was a stab in the dark for children who couldn’t walk, talk or hug. One of the children was a fecal smearer, which could interrupt a “dive” as they all filed out for the tank to be cleaned – which could set off another child, who’d violently bang his head against the wall. There, Kim found a window into other peoples’ lives. As the children watched TV, the bored caregivers and parents, wearing only cotton clothing and liberated of their potentially flammable glasses, underwire bras and belts, began to talk.

Her son called the tank “the submarine”, and he wasn’t far off: when the hatch was closed, the dim, warm space, lit only by flickering episodes of Barney and Sesame Street outside the portholes, could almost have been underwater Kim, 15 years on, likens it to confession. Although the experimental treatment was not FDA-approved and has no proven benefits, it was a last resort Kim was willing to try. The theory behind hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) goes that if damaged cells need oxygen to heal, immersing a patient in pure oxygen will accelerate healing. Kim’s son had ulcerative colitis, a condition that caused him great pain, and the constant vomiting had left him underweight.

T wice a day, every day for almost a month, Angie Kim and her then-two-year-old son would enter a hyperbaric oxygen tank, and be sealed inside.

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim