by Kaoru Takamura ; translated by Allison Markin Powell & Marie Iida ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 13, 2021
Takamura’s challenging, genre-confounding epic offers a sweeping view of contemporary Japan in all its complexity.
A daring kidnapping-and-extortion plot has deep roots in the aftermath of World War II.
Takamura uses a sensational high-profile crime from 1984 as the foundation for a layered examination of Japan’s current social and economic inequities. In 1947, 40 employees of Kanagawa’s Hinode Beer factory quit their jobs over serious health problems whose origins they traced to the factory. Seiji Okamura, one of them, wrote a lengthy letter explaining the situation. In the ensuing decades, a handful of other people from various walks of life—a pharmacy owner, a police detective, a truck driver, a credit union worker, a lathe operator—experience maladies or observe problems in their loved ones that they blame on the factory. After their common love of horse racing brings them together, their plan evolves slowly over years of sharing personal details and nursing their common grievance against Hinode’s criminality. The first third of the story follows all of the men. Takamura’s decision to make them a socio-economic cross section provides depth and texture when the focus becomes more pointed. Okamura, who's the younger brother of the pharmacist, enters a nursing home in 1990. His death triggers a plan that the men had only discussed as a kind of game. Hinode’s president, Kyosuke Shiroyama, is kidnapped but then released. A more elaborate scheme plays out as a giant chess game, tracked by a colorful police team. The tale ends on a cliffhanger—the resolution will have to wait for Volume 2.
Takamura’s challenging, genre-confounding epic offers a sweeping view of contemporary Japan in all its complexity.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-616-95701-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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by Kaoru Takamura ; translated by Marie Iida & Allison Markin Powell
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Max Brooks
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by Jeneva Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2024
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
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New York Times Bestseller
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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by Jeneva Rose
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