A gripping crime drama that’s rich with insights about modern Japan.
Investigators in Tokyo attempt to untangle a conspiracy scamming the elderly in Pronko’s crime novel.
Det. Ishii, a pugnacious female cop who works for the women’s crime task force, is contacted by Nobuko Ueno, an elderly woman who believes she’s the target of a sagi, or fraud, to bamboozle her out of her home, the only valuable property she possesses. Ishii organizes a sting to trap the perpetrators, but it goes terribly wrong, and Ueno is killed by an errant scooter. While Ueno’s death might have been an unfortunate accident, Ishii is convinced she was murdered. She joins forces with Det. Hiroshi Shimizu from the homicide department, a specialist in forensic accounting, to sort out the astonishingly complex conspiracy to prey upon the “greying population”—it’s a professional operation that’s as “as smooth and stable as a four-cylinder motorcycle engine.” The ring, led by Takuya, a maddeningly slippery criminal, takes whatever they can: pensions, life savings, even their marks’ homes. The victims are usually female, if only because they tend to live longer than their male counterparts, and often live in Shitamachi, an older, traditional, and cloistered section of eastern Tokyo. The author weaves a subtle and complicated tale with impressive skill, one in which multiple crimes seem completely disconnected but turn out to be pieces of one bleak puzzle. At the heart of this intellectually nuanced novel is the decay of old Japanese traditions, the social mores that discouraged the kind of predation that now afflicts the most vulnerable. Japanese culture is notably deferential to its elderly population, but, according to Det. Ishii, that veneration is increasingly a thing of yesteryear (“Japan’s tradition of respecting ancestors, teachers, parents—anyone older—goes back to Confucian scholars and feudal manners…but it’s all gone, isn’t it?”). Takuya is a personification of this nihilistic shift. His father abandoned him as a child and his mother died young; he was raised by a drunken grandfather who died when Takuya was only 16 years old, leaving him nothing but debt. While he’s a despicable grifter, it’s not hard to see how he could turn against elders who did so little for him; his psychological portrait is deftly painted by Pronko. Det. Hiroshi is damaged, as well; he’s also lost his parents, and he’s so stung by the loss that he neglects to use his inheritance. He’s not particularly traditional—he has a pregnant girlfriend, Ayana, and performs his professional duties with great diligence but little satisfaction. There’s something heroic about his decency, given that the societal structure that once supported such rectitude seems to be in a state of rapid decline.
Pronko’s knowledge of Japanese life is simply extraordinary—with painstaking care, he limns its shadowy contours and ambiguities. Tokyo emerges as a kind of protagonist all on its own, a melancholic and beleaguered character that somehow refuses to fully surrender its historic majesty. This is not an unchallenging read—the details of the conspiracy are many and dense, and readers will at times experience the same frustrated bewilderment as the detectives who struggle to unravel it. Pronko’s work amply rewards readers for their labor, however, with an absorbing drama conveyed with incisive intelligence.
A gripping crime drama that’s rich with insights about modern Japan.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781942410317
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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