This dark and dazzling novel defies easy categorization but consistently tantalizes and surprises.
A bizarre murder in 1970s Japan continues to reverberate through the decades. This book, originally published in 2005 under the title Eugenia, is the first by Onda to be translated into English.
After opening with a short, unusually lyrical excerpt from the transcript of a police interview, the book unfolds through chapters told from strikingly different perspectives. The first narrator is Makiko Saiga, who wrote a book about the crime in question, the poisoning of 17 people at a birthday party at the Aosawa family estate. Looking back on the murders 30 years later, Saiga, who was a child at the time, remembers it was a humid summer in a beautiful setting by the sea. Then, several months after the crime, a man who didn't seem to have any connection to the Aosawas wrote up a confession and then hanged himself. Though skeptical, the police took the opportunity to close the case. Saiga went on to research and publish The Forgotten Festival, her only book, about the crime. As she winds up her story, she implies that Hisako, the blind young Aosawa heiress and the only survivor of the massacre, might have been the killer. "You see, it's a very simple story. If there are ten people in a house and nine die, who is the culprit?" The next narrator is Saiga’s assistant, who’s highly suspicious of her boss’s motives. An excerpt from The Forgotten Festival follows, a thinly veiled dramatization in which Saiga places her younger self at the scene of the crime and implicates a man she sees as the messenger of death. Subsequent sections focus on the housekeeper’s daughter, the detective, Saiga’s older brother, and others on the way to the surprising conclusion. The domino effect of the murder on the community and the nation, as well as the swirl of uncertainty concerning the way its narratives are shaped, gives the book a striking resonance.
This dark and dazzling novel defies easy categorization but consistently tantalizes and surprises.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912242-24-5
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Patterson's thrillers (Virgin, 1980; Black Market, 1986) have plummeted in quality since his promising debut in The Thomas Berryman Number (1976)—with this latest being the sorriest yet: a clanky and witless policer about a criminal mastermind and the cop sworn to take him down. Aside from watching sympathetic homicide dick John ("Stef") Stefanovich comeing to terms with a wheelchair-bound life—legacy of a shotgun blast to the back by drug-and-gun-running archfiend Alexandre St.-Germain—the major interest here lies in marvelling at the author's trashing of fiction convention. The whopper comes early: although St.-Germain is explicity described as being machine-gunned to death by three vigilante cops in a swank brothel (". . .a submachine gun blast nearly ripped off the head of Alexandre St.-Germain"; "The mobster's head and most of his neck had been savaged by the machine-gun volley. The body looked desecrated. . ."), before you know it this latter-day Moriarty is stepping unscathed out of an airplane. What gives? Authorial cheating, that's what—thinly glossed over with some mumbling later on about a "body double." Not that St.-Germain's ersatz death generated much suspense anyway, with subsequent action focusing on, among other items, the gory killings of assorted mob bosses by one of the vigilante cops, and Stef's viewing of pornographic tapes confiscated from that brothel. But readers generous enough to plod on will get to read about the newly Lazarus-ized St.-Germain's crass efforts to revitalize and consolidate the world's crime syndicates ("the Midnight Club"), Stef's predictable tumble for a sexy true-crime writer, and how (isn't one miracle enough for Patterson?) at book's end Stef walks again and gets to embrace a rogue cop who's murdered several people. Ironsides with a badge and a lobotomy.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1988
ISBN: 0446676411
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.
Sparks fly as a woman with extraordinary abilities fights her attraction to a dangerous freelance consultant.
Dr. Kendra Michaels has worked with former FBI Agent Adam Lynch before (Double Blind, 2018), but she’s furious with him for getting her tossed out of Afghanistan after she sustained a minor wound while trying to root out corruption. Kendra, who was blind until an experimental operation restored her sight at 20, has highly developed senses of smell, hearing, and spatial awareness that she’s used to help the FBI and CIA in many difficult cases. Now, as she returns to the U.S., they have another one she can’t resist investigating. Elaine Wessler and Ronald Kim, both staff members at her old school, the Woodward Academy for the Physically Disabled in Oceanside, California, have been found murdered for no apparent reason, and FBI Special Agent Michael Griffin is anxious to use her skills and inside knowledge. Elaine had been fostering an unusual guide dog, Harley, who's had problems adjusting since the child he was working with was killed in a gas-main explosion. Now that Elaine is gone, his unearthly howls are upsetting the students. Kendra talks her best friend, Olivia, who’s blind, into sharing custody of Harley until they can find him the right home. Meanwhile, she turns up clues the FBI team missed and is rewarded for her efforts with a bomb planted in her car. It turns out to be fake, but it’s still a potent warning to walk away. Returning from Afghanistan to help Kendra, Lynch finds her still angry with him and intent on resisting his charms. Her friend Jessie Mercado, a private eye, turns up to help extricate her from a dangerous situation and sticks around to join the hunt for the killers. It will take all of them, including Harley, to solve the violent, complex case and get the school Kendra loves back on track.
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6292-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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