Miyabi’s fourth English translation (Crossfire, 2006, etc.) is a boldly imagined howdunit and a penetrating look at the...
A killer with a foolproof means of murder ticks victims methodically off his Tokyo hit list as a high-school student races to save the last target.
Bride-to-be Fumie Kato leaps from her apartment roof. Wage-slave Atsuko Mita throws herself under an oncoming subway train. University student Yoko Sugano runs in front of a taxicab at a deserted late-night intersection. That would be the end of the story, but the cabdriver’s nephew, Mamoru Kusaka, is certain his uncle wasn’t lying when he said that he had a green light. Hungry for more facts about the fatality, Mamoru picks the lock on Yoko’s door—a skill he acquired after his father ran off under suspicion of embezzling 50 million yen from his municipal office—and finds evidence that soon links Yoko’s apparent suicide to the others. Defensive about his family history and picked on at school, Mamoru is a most unlikely sleuth. And the unknown antagonist who phones him to express admiration for his efforts and announce the futility of continuing them seems unstoppable. (One demonstration of his powers, duly predicted and fulfilled, is especially unnerving.) But Mamoru presses on with his do-it-yourself investigation and soon learns that the answers he seeks only raise more disturbing questions about duty, vengeance and family loyalty.
Miyabi’s fourth English translation (Crossfire, 2006, etc.) is a boldly imagined howdunit and a penetrating look at the problems of establishing and maintaining an identity in modern Japan.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-4-7700-3053-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
An amusingly complex con combines with little-known historical details to provide an enchanting read.
A determined woman seeks justice.
Elizabeth Miles had a disreputable past as a grifter, but a chance friendship with Mrs. Bates, a suffragette, introduced her into New York society, and now she’s engaged to her friend's son, Gideon Bates, a straight-arrow lawyer. While Gideon is waiting to be called up to serve in the Great War, Cpl. Thomas Preston asks him to draft a new will leaving Thomas’ money and his one-third share in Preston Shoe Manufacturing to his pregnant new wife, Rose O’Dell, instead of his older brother, Fred, who currently shares ownership of the company with Thomas and Delia, their young, widowed stepmother. Since Rose is not the sort the Preston family would approve of, Gideon writes the will in secret, naming himself executor, and Thomas leaves it with Rose. All too soon thereafter, an angry Fred Preston barges into Gideon’s office saying that his brother is dead and his brother's widow claims to be the heir. Refusing to reveal his client’s business, Gideon visits Rose’s apartment, where he runs into the bruiser who attempted to strangle her and stole the only signed copy of the will. It’s clear that neither Fred nor his stepmother will help Rose, whom Elizabeth moves to her aunt’s house, where she and several other progressive women live, knowing that she’ll be safe. When neither threats of court cases nor attempts to shame Fred work, Elizabeth turns to her brother and father, the Old Man, and their talented group of con men (City of Secrets, 2018, etc.) to find a way to raise money for Rose and the coming child. Disapproving of war profiteers and men who hurt women, the group comes up with a clever plan that will make Rose rich and pay them something for their efforts. They stumble into the American Protective League, a nest of German spies, and a still more dangerous enemy in the Spanish flu, which will kill vast numbers all over the globe.
An amusingly complex con combines with little-known historical details to provide an enchanting read.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0565-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Though the impatient, tightfisted, homophobic lead detective is impossible to love, the mind-boggling plot triumphs over its...
Television writer/Christie-loving Sherlock-ian Horowitz (Magpie Murders, 2017, etc.) spins a fiendishly clever puzzle about a television writer/Christie-loving Sherlock-ian named Anthony Something who partners with a modern Sherlock Holmes to solve a baffling case.
Six hours after widowed London socialite Diana Cowper calls on mortician Robert Cornwallis to make arrangements for her own funeral, she’s suddenly in need of them after getting strangled in her home. The Met calls on murder specialist Daniel Hawthorne, an ex-DI bounced off the force for reasons he’d rather not talk about, and he calls on the narrator (“nobody ever calls me Tony”), a writer in between projects whose agent expects him to be working on The House of Silk, a Holmes-ian pastiche which Horowitz happens to have published in real life. Anthony’s agreement with Hawthorne to collaborate on a true-crime account of the case is guaranteed to blindside his agent (in a bad way) and most readers (in entrancingly good ways). Diana Cowper, it turns out, is not only the mother of movie star Damian Cowper, but someone who had her own brush with fame 10 years ago when she accidentally ran over a pair of 8-year-old twins, killing Timothy Godwin and leaving Jeremy Godwin forever brain-damaged. A text message Diana sent Damian moments before her death—“I have seen the boy who was lacerated and I’m afraid”—implicates both Jeremy, who couldn’t possibly have killed her, and the twins’ estranged parents, Alan and Judith Godwin, who certainly could have. But which of them, or which other imaginable suspect, would have sneaked a totally unpredictable surprise into her coffin and then rushed out to commit another murder?
Though the impatient, tightfisted, homophobic lead detective is impossible to love, the mind-boggling plot triumphs over its characters: Sharp-witted readers who think they’ve solved the puzzle early on can rest assured that they’ve opened only one of many dazzling Christmas packages Horowitz has left beautifully wrapped under the tree.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267678-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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