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
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
This complicated gothic thriller of dueling spouses and homicidal writers is cleverly plotted and neatly tied up.
An unhappy British couple attempt to rekindle the magic with a weekend trip to a remote spot in Scotland.
How is she tricking me? Feeney, the author of Sometimes I Lie (2017) and His and Hers (2020), has trained her readers to start asking this question immediately with her puzzle-box narratives. Well, you won't find out here. Only the basics: Amelia's won a weekend getaway in an office raffle, and as the novel opens, she and her screenwriter husband, Adam, who suffers from face blindness, along with their dog, Bob, are miserably making their way through a snowstorm to a destination in the Scottish Highlands which is no Airbnb Superhost, that's for sure. A freezing cold, barely converted church with many locked rooms and malfunctioning electricity, the property also features a mysterious caretaker who has left firewood and a nice note but seems to be spying through the window. Both Adam and Amelia seem to be considering this weekend the occasion for ending the marriage by any means necessary—then Bob disappears. The narrative goes back and forth with first-person chapters by Amelia and Adam interleaved with a series of letters written to Adam on their anniversary through the years and keyed to the traditional gifts: paper, cotton, wood, leather, etc. There's also a rock and a scissors, referring to the children's game of the book title, which the couple use to make everyday decisions like "Should we stay together?" Offstage is the famous writer Henry Winter, whose novels Adam has made his fortune adapting; through several author-characters, Feeney weaves in sometimes-grim observations about the literary life. On meeting a sourpuss cashier at the rural grocery store: "The woman wore her bitterness like a badge; the kind of person who writes one-star book reviews."
This complicated gothic thriller of dueling spouses and homicidal writers is cleverly plotted and neatly tied up.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-26610-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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