D.M. Sorlie has made headway in the industry with a historical fiction niche bannered by the Sue Lee Mystery series, a historical fiction starting at the beginning of World War Two and following the timeline of the war. The series continues into the post-war years.

Sue Lee Mysteries started in an antique store in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was browsing through all newspapers about World War II, especially Pearl Harbor. However, came across a pre-war article about a request for those fluent in the Japanese language to contact the Army base in San Francisco. If Americans were to go into a war against the Japanese, Army Intelligence realized that they had very few personnel who could speak the language or understand the Japanese culture.

I envisioned an intelligent young lady, Sue Lee Ono, a graduate of Stanford University, fluent in languages.

That led me to develop Uncle Yoshi, whose expertise is Japanese artifacts. He passed his knowledge to his niece, Sue Lee, recruited by the Army to teach Japanese codebreakers. At the same time, trying to solve a family murder mystery and a missing Asia artifact during the confrontations of World War II.