A gripping crime drama that’s rich with insights about modern Japan.
Investigators in Tokyo attempt to untangle a conspiracy scamming the elderly in Pronko’s crime novel.
Det. Ishii, a pugnacious female cop who works for the women’s crime task force, is contacted by Nobuko Ueno, an elderly woman who believes she’s the target of a sagi, or fraud, to bamboozle her out of her home, the only valuable property she possesses. Ishii organizes a sting to trap the perpetrators, but it goes terribly wrong, and Ueno is killed by an errant scooter. While Ueno’s death might have been an unfortunate accident, Ishii is convinced she was murdered. She joins forces with Det. Hiroshi Shimizu from the homicide department, a specialist in forensic accounting, to sort out the astonishingly complex conspiracy to prey upon the “greying population”—it’s a professional operation that’s as “as smooth and stable as a four-cylinder motorcycle engine.” The ring, led by Takuya, a maddeningly slippery criminal, takes whatever they can: pensions, life savings, even their marks’ homes. The victims are usually female, if only because they tend to live longer than their male counterparts, and often live in Shitamachi, an older, traditional, and cloistered section of eastern Tokyo. The author weaves a subtle and complicated tale with impressive skill, one in which multiple crimes seem completely disconnected but turn out to be pieces of one bleak puzzle. At the heart of this intellectually nuanced novel is the decay of old Japanese traditions, the social mores that discouraged the kind of predation that now afflicts the most vulnerable. Japanese culture is notably deferential to its elderly population, but, according to Det. Ishii, that veneration is increasingly a thing of yesteryear (“Japan’s tradition of respecting ancestors, teachers, parents—anyone older—goes back to Confucian scholars and feudal manners…but it’s all gone, isn’t it?”). Takuya is a personification of this nihilistic shift. His father abandoned him as a child and his mother died young; he was raised by a drunken grandfather who died when Takuya was only 16 years old, leaving him nothing but debt. While he’s a despicable grifter, it’s not hard to see how he could turn against elders who did so little for him; his psychological portrait is deftly painted by Pronko. Det. Hiroshi is damaged, as well; he’s also lost his parents, and he’s so stung by the loss that he neglects to use his inheritance. He’s not particularly traditional—he has a pregnant girlfriend, Ayana, and performs his professional duties with great diligence but little satisfaction. There’s something heroic about his decency, given that the societal structure that once supported such rectitude seems to be in a state of rapid decline.
Pronko’s knowledge of Japanese life is simply extraordinary—with painstaking care, he limns its shadowy contours and ambiguities. Tokyo emerges as a kind of protagonist all on its own, a melancholic and beleaguered character that somehow refuses to fully surrender its historic majesty. This is not an unchallenging read—the details of the conspiracy are many and dense, and readers will at times experience the same frustrated bewilderment as the detectives who struggle to unravel it. Pronko’s work amply rewards readers for their labor, however, with an absorbing drama conveyed with incisive intelligence.
A gripping crime drama that’s rich with insights about modern Japan.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781942410317
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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