The first sentence of “Red Thread of Fate” is as riveting a first sentence as I’ve ever read. “She was on the phone with her husband when he died.” What?! You can’t stop reading after that kind of first sentence. At the heart of Lyn Liao Butler’s newest novel is the concept that our family is what and who we make it. It might be those who are born into our family, but often our family includes those who are adopted (and they come with two and four legs), those we informally “adopt” as honorary family members, and close friends we trust and love. And while Butler’s book focuses on family, and how Tam, the main character, reacts when she is confronted with an apparent betrayal by her husband and his cousin, she also presents, to a lesser extent, the smaller betrayals we might perpetrate by, for example, not listening to our parents and their stories, by not stopping to listen to those we love, or by thinking only of ourselves and how things affect us.