KindlePrintReviews

The Ginza Ghost and Other Stories

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Written by Keikichi Osaka, translated by Ho-Ling Wong — Tokyo has changed a great deal in the past century or so. There have been two catastrophic earthquakes, heavy bombing during World War II, and spiralling property prices that led to an eventual collapse. On the…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Blue Light Yokohama

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Written by Nicolas Obregon – What an entertaining debut! Told almost exclusively from the perspective of Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Inspector Kosuke Iwata, it’s a multilayered police procedural involving murder, official corruption, and dangerous secrets. A brief prologue set in 1996 describes the death of…
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PrintReviews

Deep Red

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Written by Hisashi Nozawa, translated by Asumi Shibata — Kanako Akiba is 11 years old and just like any other sixth-grader, laughing with her friends and sharing scary stories late at night on thespring trip. But when her teacher barges in and tells her she’s been…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

The Silent Dead

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Written by Tetsuya Honda, translated by Giles Murray — Recently I lamented the decline of the classic police procedural – but how quickly I’ve been proven wrong. The genre appears truly alive and well, not least of all in Japan, where authors such as Hideo…
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Book Club

Malice

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Japanese sensation Keigo Higashino is back with his fourth novel in English translation – the first of his series following police detective Kyoichiro Kaga. Here popular author Kunihiko Hidaka is found dead in his home the day before he is due to leave the country….
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Book Club

The Investigation

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Korean crime fiction is something of a rarity, so this translation by Chi-Young Kim is a find. It is 1944, and a mixture of criminals, anti-war activists and Korean partisans are being held in Fukuoka Prison, a Japanese POW camp. The guards have a particularly…
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