A brisk and atmospheric true-crime thriller.
A dark, twist-filled mystery, the last in British author Peace's trilogy set in occupied 1940s Tokyo following Occupied City (2009) and Tokyo Year Zero (2007).
Veteran crime writer Peace, who (following James Ellroy) has said that he sees no reason to invent new crimes, follows his own precept here, focusing on one of Japan's most infamous unsolved cases: the death in 1949 of the National Railways' first president, Sadanori Shimoyama. Under pressure from the American occupying authorities, Shimoyama was being forced to lay off 100,000 workers, which made him a man both despised and depressed. One morning he was picked up as usual by his chauffeur, taken first to a bank and then to a department store. He said he'd return in five minutes, headed in—and disappeared. Late that night, Shimoyama's body was discovered alongside a rail line, grotesquely dismembered by a passing train. But was it suicide or homicide? Had he been dead hours before, as an autopsy indicated? If so, why did several people spot him that evening—or think they did—near the scene of his body's discovery, wandering and plucking weeds? Peace's intricate retelling/reimagining of the story begins in the immediate aftermath, with a disillusioned, hard-drinking American detective named Harry Sweeney. It then jumps forward to 1964, amid a revived city preparing to host the world for the Olympic Games. There, private investigator Murota Hideki, a policeman during the occupation, searches for an eccentric missing writer who was a loud proponent of the theory that Shimoyama was murdered—and who battles his own demons. Then the book leaps forward one last time, to 1988. There, against the backdrop of the emperor's protracted final illness, elderly American expatriate Donald Reichenbach, a teacher and translator, ends up being the one who must finally unravel, and reckon with the implications of, the now 40-year-old mystery. Sometimes Peace's style overrelies on line-by-line repetition, but the book has a songlike cadence that—thanks both to the riddles within riddles of the so-called "Shimoyama incident" itself and Peace's sure veteran hand with suspense—trundles the reader along with a train's inexorable momentum.
A brisk and atmospheric true-crime thriller.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-307-26376-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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