BLUEFIN BLUES

Time was when bluefin tuna sold for only a dollar or two a pound. Now Japan's appetite for imported sushi has pushed that price through the roof and made tuna fishing off Cape Cod something of a cutthroat business. But that still doesn't explain why Charlie Snow's boat, Lady Pamela, should've run down a sportfisher in the fog, leaving one passenger dead and the others hopping mad—or why, when the cops find the Lady Pamela floating off Sesuit Harbor, they also find the harpooned corpse of Akito Mishima aboard. Hashimoto Takaido, Mishima's fisher-king grandfather back in Tokyo, saying he's grieved and embarrassed by the unavenged death of his grandson, hires Aristotle Socarides to look into the case. But after breaking Charlie's alibi—he could well have been aboard Lady Pamela after all—Soc finds the investigation getting away from him in a series of surprises. (At least he's surprised.) His white-haired client isn't exactly what he's supposed to be; the police inspector sent over from Tokyo to work the case turns out to be a Yiddish-spouting cowboy (with a Polish-Inuit girlfriend); and the obligatory rivalry among tuna fishers—very smartly dished up by Kemprecos—doesn't begin to explain the reason Akito Mishima died. The tidy, predictable ending to Soc's sixth (The Mayflower Murder, 1996, etc.) only confirms the general sense that the Yakuza are a lot more menacing—a lot more interesting, even—on their home turf.