Tokyo Kill

July 7, 2014
Lancet’s second novel featuring Tokyo-based PI Jim Brodie falls short of the high standard set by his debut, 2013’s Japantown. Brodie agrees to take the case of Akira Miura, a 93-year-old former soldier, who freely admits he committed war crimes as a young man on duty in China during Japan’s occupation in the years before WWII. In recent weeks, Miura claims, several of his surviving fellow soldiers have been murdered in a series of home invasions, and he wants Brodie to investigate as well as provide protection. Miura suspects a vigilante Chinese triad is behind the killings, but Brody quickly figures out something else is at stake. As the case progresses, Brodie encounters a series of sneering, interchangeable bad guys in a plot that consists of scene after confrontational scene involving knife fights, poisonings, and martial arts showdowns with little supporting structure in between. Repetitive, aimless dialogue doesn’t help. Agent: Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group.

September 15, 2014
Tokyo-based PI and antiques dealer Jim Brodie, introduced in Japantown (2013), is targeted by a lethal gang for investigating the brutal home-invasion murder of two elderly men and their families. A one-time fellow soldier of the slain men, feisty 96-year-old Akira Miura is certain the killings were acts of reprisal. In the years before World War II, when Japan occupied China, Miura's company there shot prisoners to "entertain" their superiors. Now, he insists, the deadly Chinese Triad gangs are out to avenge those crimes. It isn't long before Brodie is defending himself, or trying to, against trained attackers with blades and bamboo weapons. Through the underground Chinese contacts provided by his ambitious female police partner, Rie-a romantic attraction who is indignant over his efforts to protect her-he discovers that a mysterious Japanese crime ring is responsible for the killings, not the Triad. The ultrarare paintings of a Japanese monk a London collector has asked him to find may be at the heart of the mystery. And if all of this isn't enough to worry about, Brodie, whose wife was murdered, must also keep his young daughter safe. His enemies are well-aware of her existence. Though the novel gets off to a crisp start, boasting surefire characters including the taciturn, thick-chested chief detective Noda and a notorious crime figure called TNT who owes Brodie favors, things never rise to the level of excitement or surprise of Japantown. The historical material slows things down. The confrontations lack the cool menace of the ones in the first book. And as serviceable as Barbados is for the climax, the particulars of Brodie's concept all but demand a return to San Francisco, the other town in which he operates. Lancet hits a few bumps the second time around, but his series remains highly distinctive.

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August 1, 2014
In Japantown (2013), we met Jim Brodie, a San Francisco antiques dealer who, having spent many years living in Japan, was asked by the SFPD to help with a series of crimes connected to the city's Japanese population. Here, in the second Brodie novel, Jim is in Tokyo, where he has inherited a stake in his late father's security firm, when a new client walks into the offices of Brodie Security. The man, a Japanese WWII veteran, claims that a Chinese triad organization is behind a recent string of home invasions that have left some of his military comrades dead. Brodie wonders why the triads would want to kill elderly Japanese soldiers but agrees to assign the man some protection. Turns out the soldier wasn't exaggerating. The author's familiarity with Japanese history and culture, combined with his storytelling skills, make this a first-rate mystery, at least as good as Japantown. That novel could have worked just fine as a one-off, but this second book is a clear indicator that Lancet considers Jim Brodie a series-worthy character. He'd be right, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)