There’s more politics than mayhem here, but fans of hard-boiled fiction will enjoy seeing how Japanese cop shops work.
Linked novellas from the dean of Japanese noir.
Yokoyama knows his way around a police station, as these linked novellas, reminiscent of Janwillem van de Wetering’s Amsterdam Cops series, suggest. Yet a Japanese police station is a place that’s thoroughly politicized and bureaucratic. A constant presence in each of the stories is a personnel director named Shinji Futawatari, whom everyone fears because he has unusually broad powers to reassign people to different jobs, elevating some and demoting others. “Fortunately,” writes Yokoyama, “it was a particular strength of Personnel to nurture posts that were both impenetrable and obscure, enabling transfers that were recognizable from the inside as punitive yet justifiable to the outside as existing to 'strengthen Department X or Y.' ” Futawatari’s life is made miserable by a 42-year veteran detective who refuses to be shuffled from his post for reasons that, a detective ventures, have something to do with “all that other shit.” The veteran cop, who could teach Bartleby the Scrivener a thing or two, won’t talk about it or consider a transfer, leaving Futawatari frustrated and powerless. In the next story, Futawatari—who’d been named a superintendent at the age of 40 and is nicknamed the “ace,” not for his skills but as “a reference to the trump card he held”—is a peripheral player in a cat-and-mouse game in which an anonymous cop is blackmailing a senior officer. The same threat plays in the fourth story, with a politician threatening to expose another top cop, sending the prefecture scrambling to dig up dirt. When Masaki Tsuge, who works in the Prefectural Police Headquarters, pleads on his boss’s behalf, the politico answers, smugly, “If you’re this good at kowtowing, you might want to consider running for election.” The story that precedes it is the most elusive, in which a promising woman sergeant in a deeply sexist enterprise—as Yokoyama writes, “Questions of gender aside, she was exactly the type of officer the force needed”—simply disappears from her station one day.
There’s more politics than mayhem here, but fans of hard-boiled fiction will enjoy seeing how Japanese cop shops work.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-23704-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
A potent and surprising novel by the ever-reliable Crais.
Hired to find the father of celebrity “muffin girl” Traci Beller 10 years after his disappearance, PI Elvis Cole uncovers a nefarious plot that puts his life and those he contacts at risk.
The sweetly likable Traci, now 23, has amassed a huge following with her website, The Baker Next Door, and on social media. Against the advice and self-interest of the people who over-manage her career, she decides to find out what happened to her father. Cole quickly determines that he was last seen at the SurfMutt hamburger stand, where he gave a ride to Anya Given, a troubled 15-year-old whose mother, Sadie, was late in picking her up from the skate park across the street. With the reluctant help of a scattered young woman who used to work at the burger joint, Cole tracks down Anya and Sadie, who is eventually revealed to have a criminal past. For his efforts, he’s jumped by a small gang of men who send him to the hospital with the worst beating of his life. (Asked by a nurse what his name is, the best he can guess is “Los Angeles.”) Still in recovery, Cole and Joe Pike, his ex-Marine partner, trace his attackers to Sadie, with unexpected results. As ever, Crais draws the reader in via his protagonist’s casual, dryly humorous manner and the book’s relaxed ties to classic noir. Slowly but surely, the plot gains intensity and deadly purpose. Just when you think the missing persons case is solved, Crais ratchets things up with a devastating follow-through. This is the L.A. novelist’s 20th Cole mystery, following such efforts as The Watchman (2007) and Racing the Light (2022). It may be his most powerful.
A potent and surprising novel by the ever-reliable Crais.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780525535768
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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