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
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
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