An exceedingly thoughtful but often heart-pounding crime story.
An automaker tries to cover up a bestselling car’s defect in this thriller that combines corporate intrigue and organized crime.
In 2003, a Japanese man named Osamu Tomoda was driving to meet some old college friends in Saitama Prefecture when the wheel of his car seized up, causing a collision. Tragically, the other driver died when his vehicle was consumed by flames, leaving Tomoda crushed with guilt. The police seemed skeptical that the accident was caused by a mechanical failure but couldn’t prove any wrongdoing; later, Tomoda learns that other Eagle SUV drivers experienced similar problems. He posts a note on an online forum, which attracts four other posts from Eagle drivers reporting similar mechanical failures. Meanwhile, top executives working for the carmaker, the Goryo Auto Company, also become aware of the issue but attempt to suppress it for fear of a recall, which would not only be financially costly, but also devastating to the company’s reputation. Also, a top crime boss, Sassa, owns shares in the company and wants to delay a recall so that his investment will continue to appreciate. Caught in the middle of the mess is Shunichi Okada, a managerial chief at Central Fire & Marine, the company that insures Goryo, as well as some Eagle owners claiming engineering dysfunction. Okada uncovers evidence that suggests the Eagle has been plagued with a mechanical glitch—but then his own company tries to bury his findings. Soon, both Tomoda’s and Okada’s careers are threatened, and after a powerful lawyer with strong ties to the criminal underworld gets involved, their lives could be in danger, too. Shima (Outsider Artist, 2017, etc.) is expertly knowledgeable about the Japanese automobile industry, and he meticulously unravels Goryo’s complex skein of private profiteering and public regulation. He also cleverly juxtaposes the automobile maker, the insurance company, and the cosmos of organized crime, displaying the dark ways in which they share common ground. The threats begin subtly, develop into an ominous cascade of innuendo and implication, and then crescendo when a dog’s severed head shows up at Tomoda’s home. The entire story is written in plain, clear prose, which is helpful given the often complex bureaucratic elements that underpin the drama. However, these elements can still be confounding at times, which may compel readers to move slowly and even take notes. The author explains the legal and economic context with painstaking clarity, but the minutiae still snowball into a minor mountain of detail by the end. Nevertheless, patient readers will be well-rewarded for their troubles, as the book’s chilling amalgam of administrative banality and criminal nihilism is its biggest strength. Okada emerges as the perfect protagonist for this multifaceted tale—a technocrat who’s devoted to both his friend and to the truth, the twin pillars of moral motivation. And Tsukasa Tamai, the lawyer summoned by the crime bosses to make the recall problem vanish, is an intelligently constructed and unsettling combination of professional sophistication and brutality.
An exceedingly thoughtful but often heart-pounding crime story.Pub Date: May 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5466-7477-1
Page Count: 350
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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