Delving into sordid and ruthless lives at the bottom of Japan Inc.'s social ladder, this whirlwind odyssey in search of Japan's current under-25 generation is a mixed bag. Undoubtedly, freelance journalist Greenfeld has unearthed some fabulously riveting material. Take, for example, his chapter on Choco Bon Bon and Emi, a pair of porn stars brought together by a wily entrepreneur called Shoji Onizawa. Choco is one of Japan's top male porn celebrities, named for his chocolate-hued testicles. We see him smoking shabu, or crystal meth, in a hotel room while Onizawa frantically tries to find exactly the right female lead—an innocent who will be penetrated anally for the first time on film. The result is hilarious and grim. The film gets made, Onizawa makes his buck, and Emi, having been paid several million yen and a diamond ring, joins the ranks of the porn elite. Several of the chapters inevitably deal with the Yakuza (organized crime), and with the bosozuku, or motorcycle gangs. One chapter—an enthralling portrait of working-class delinquency, ambition, and violence- -portrays Tats, a chimpara, or little prick, the lowest rank in the gangster hierarchy. Elsewhere, Greenfeld deals with such topics as hostessu (foreign bar hostesses), students at the elite Tokyo University housed in Third Worldlevel barracks, the youth drug culture, right-wing militants, and Tokyo call girls. Overall, it's a tense and spicy read, sprinkled with delicious details and gossip. But Greenfield tries to be both hard-bitten and hip, with sometimes numbing attention to modish detail, and occasionally his tale is dragged down by heavy-handed writing. Both this book and the Japanese kids it so carefully describes bring to mind Dali's comment to a youthful painter: ``Don't try so hard to be contemporary. Alas for you, it's the one thing you'll be whether you like it or not.'' (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017309-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.
In Hoag’s (Cold, Cold Heart, 2015, etc.) latest, Minneapolis homicide detective Sam Kovac has been separated from his longtime partner, the diminutive yet hard-charging Nikki Liska.
Nikki wanted more time with her teenage sons, so she sought assignment to the department’s new cold case unit, where she's intrigued by the decades-old unsolved murder of Ted Duffy, a sex crimes detective, despite push back from a retired detective close to his family. Sam’s first case without Nikki is the double murder—"raw animal violence"—of Lucien Chamberlain, an Asian studies professor, and his wife, Sondra, who were slashed to death with the professor’s own antique samurai weapons. Chamberlain was an egotistical, misogynistic megalomaniac. Even his adult children hated him. Son Charles is damned by OCD and his father’s unachievable expectations. Daughter Diana is bipolar and hypersexual. Nikki's and Sam’s cases become parallel stories of anger, isolation, ambition, violence, revenge, and perversion. With Duffy’s widow married to his prosperous twin brother and reluctant to cooperate, Nikki has no lead until she discovers Evi, Duffy’s long-ago foster child. Sam has too many suspects, including an ex-con working for a handyman service, Charles and Diana, and professor Ken Sato, Diana’s lover and Lucien’s rival for department chair. Hoag adds depth to the tale with secondary characters like the preening Sato; fragile librarian Jennifer Duffy, broken and isolated by her father’s murder; and the new homicide lieutenant, Joan Mascherino, who's tough-minded and empathetic, with knife-keen intelligence hidden under a prim personality intolerant of swearing. With an ear for sardonic cop dialogue and humor—Sondra Chamberlain regularly ended her day with a "bottle of Chateau Blackout"—Hoag livens up these two already fast-paced, ripped-from-the-headlines mysteries with interesting factoids about such things as the history of female samurai.
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95455-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when...
A New Hampshire cop tries to piece together a mysterious woman’s life following a car accident and discovers nothing is as it seems.
Gardner (Fear Nothing, 2014, etc.) puts Sgt. Wyatt Foster front and center in this overly complicated thriller, while corporate security expert—and Foster’s new girlfriend—Tessa Leoni, from the 2011 Love You More, plays a distant second fiddle. When Foster is called to a single-car accident on a rural road, it seems like driver Nicole Frank simply drank too much Scotch and drove off the road. But Nicole, who miraculously survives the crash, insists that her daughter, Vero, is still missing. Foster and his team launch a massive search until Nicole’s husband, Thomas, arrives at the hospital and tells the police that there is no child: Nicole suffered a traumatic brain injury (actually several), causing her to conjure an imaginary daughter. As the details of Nicole’s original injury—she suspiciously fell down both her basement and front stairs within the span of a few months—emerge, Foster and the reader become more, rather than less, confused. Nicole’s history unspools in calculated sound bites, with each episode ending in an artificial cliffhanger. According to Nicole—who claims to be “the woman who died twice”—she escaped a horrific childhood in a brothel known as the Dollhouse, a place that’s the nexus of the mystery surrounding Vero, who may or may not be a figment of her addled brain.
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when it finally comes, doesn’t answer all the plot’s unnecessary questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95456-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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