Tag: crime

Throwback Thursday: The Last Train by Michael Pronko

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ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme originally created by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago.

Today I’m revisiting a book I reviewed in December 2017 but which had been on my author review pile for quite a long while before that – The Last Train by Michael Pronko – the first in the author’s Detective Hiroshi series set in Tokyo.  The Last Train was published in May 2017 and you can find purchase links below.  It is also now available as an audiobook.

The Moving BladeAs you will see from my review below, I really enjoyed The Last Train so I was thrilled to learn from the author’s July newsletter that the next book in the series, The Moving Blade, is due out on 10th September 2018.  Find out more about it here.

TheLastTrainAbout the Book

Detective Hiroshi Shimizu investigates white collar crime in Tokyo. He’s lost his girlfriend and still dreams of his time studying in America, but with a stable job, his own office and a half-empty apartment, he’s settled in.   When an American businessman turns up dead, his mentor Takamatsu calls him out to the site of a grisly murder. A glimpse from a security camera video suggests the killer was a woman, but in Japan, that seems unlikely. Hiroshi quickly learns how close homicide and suicide can appear in a city full of high-speed trains just a step – or a push – away. Takamatsu drags Hiroshi out to the hostess clubs and skyscraper offices of Tokyo in search of the killer. To find her, Hiroshi goes deeper and deeper into Tokyo’s intricate, ominous market for buying and selling the most expensive land in the world. Hiroshi’s determined to cut through Japan’s ambiguities – and dangers – to find the murdering ex-hostess before she extracts her final revenge – which just might be him.

Format: Audiobook/ebook, paperback (348 pp.) Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
Published: 5th May 2017                                          Genre: Crime, Thriller

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Last Train on Goodreads

My Review

When I interviewed Michael on my blog last year (click here to read the full interview), he described The Last Train as ‘more whydunit than whodunit’ and having now read the book I can certainly understood why he said that.  Much of the excitement of the book comes from following detective Hiroshi Suzuki in his attempts to identify and track down the woman who committed the murderer.  The trail leads him from the flashy malls and smart high-rise buildings to the decidedly seedier world of hostess clubs and bars.  As the author explains, “…in the novel, I wanted to look beneath the surface. The giant skyscrapers and constant construction are amazing, but there’s a lot going on behind the go-go big-city bright-lights, and a lot of it not so good.”

As the investigation progresses, Hiroshi begins to understand the threat he faces from vested interests who may be involved in the shady dealings he starts to uncover.  He also starts to realise just what a clever and ruthless opponent he is up against and to get an inkling into the motivation that drives her.  When the full facts are revealed you may find yourself questioning where true justice lies.

What really set The Last Train apart from other run-of-the-mill crime thrillers for me was its Tokyo setting.  I loved learning all about Japanese culture and customs.  Take this scene in which Hiroshi and his boss, Takamatsu, drink sake together in the traditional manner.

‘The master pulled back a brown curtain over a glass-sided refrigerator filled with sake bottles.  He pulled out two small chilled glasses from the top shelf and set these on the upper counter inside small, square, cedar wood boxes.  The master shuffled the dozen or so bottles inside the fridge until he found the ones he wanted.  Carrying these to the counter, he hoisted the large bottle of cold sake and, cradling it in the crook of his arm, poured out the clear, clean liquid.  The sake flowed gently over the top of the lip of the glass into the box, arousing the aroma of cedar and fresh rice.  He poured out sake from a different bottle for Hiroshi and placed both bottles on the counter so that each displayed the artful calligraphy of their labels.

They bowed down like penitents to take the first sip without spilling.  Then they plucked up the small, thumb-sized glasses for a silent toast before downing the second gulp.  Finally, they poured the spill-over from the cedar box into the glass, took another sip, and set their half-full glasses back inside the wet cedar boxes.’

The book cleverly brings to life the intriguing juxtaposition of ancient and modern that exists in Japan.  So you have the temples and prayer rituals, the elaborate customs for greeting and drinking tea.  But at the same time you have the flashy malls full of shops selling designer goods and the latest technology and the packed subways and sidewalks of Roppongi.

‘People streamed out of subway exits, slid out of taxis, and stepped off bus after bus.  Hordes of office workers in dull gray pants and dark skirts blocked corners, shouting directions into their cell phones to those yet to arrive.  Fashion-conscious hipsters, mini-skirted amateurs, and yakuza wannabes walked to their favourite places to play, eat, drink, or work.’

The work culture with its emphasis on drinking with colleagues after work, to my eyes at least, seems particularly alien and the position of women quite regressive with real antipathy in some quarters towards women whose behaviour is seen as ‘un-Japanese’.

I really enjoyed The Last Train for both its compelling storyline and its use of Tokyo as a location.  Luckily for me – and I suspect, other readers – the author is working on two further books in the series, both of which are due for publication in 2018.

In three words: Atmospheric, compelling, mystery

Try something similar… Wolves in the Dark by Gunnar Staalesen (click here to read my review)

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MichaelPronkoAbout the Author

Michael Pronko is a professor of American Literature and Culture at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo and writes about Japanese culture, art, jazz, and politics for Newsweek Japan, The Japan Times, Artscape Japan and other publications.  He has appeared on NHK Public TV, Tokyo MXTV and Nippon Television.  His website, Jazz in Japan can be found at www.jazzinjapan.com.  His award-winning collections of essays about life in Tokyo are: Beauty and Chaos: Slices and Morsels of Tokyo Life (2014), Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens: Essays on Tokyo (2014), and Motions and Moments: More Essays on Tokyo (2015). He has also published three essay collections in Japanese.  When not teaching or writing, he wanders Tokyo contemplating its intensity and waiting for the stories to come.

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Blog Tour/Review/Guest Post: The Hidden Bones (Clare Hills #1) by Nicola Ford

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I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Hidden Bones by Nicola Ford. It’s the first in a new crime mystery series featuring archaeologist Clare Hills. You can read my review of The Hidden Bones below plus I also have a wonderful guest post from Nicola, entitled ‘Wiltshire Noire’.

The Hidden BonesAbout the Book

Following the recent death of her husband, Clare Hills is listless and unsure of her place in the world. When her former university friend Dr David Barbrook asks her to help him sift through the effects of deceased archaeologist Gerald Hart, she sees this as a useful distraction from her grief. During her search, Clare stumbles across the unpublished journals detailing Gerald’s most glittering dig. Hidden from view for decades and supposedly destroyed in an arson attack, she cannot believe her luck. Finding the Hungerbourne Barrows archive is every archaeologist’s dream. Determined to document Gerald’s career-defining find for the public, Clare and David delve into his meticulously kept records of the excavation.

But the dream suddenly becomes a nightmare as the pair unearth a disturbing discovery, putting them at the centre of a murder inquiry and in the path of a dangerous killer determined to bury the truth for ever.

Format: Hardcover, ebook (352 pp.)   Publisher: Allison and Busby Published: 21st June 2018  Genre: Crime, Mystery

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Publisher ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Hidden Bones on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘Wiltshire Noire’ by Nicola Ford, author of The Hidden Bones

People make landscapes and landscapes make people. Whether it’s the urban inner city landscape of London, New York or Paris or the bleakly beautiful uplands of the High Peak. Both are to a large extent man made and where we live and spend our lives shapes not only our views and opinions but also how we live our lives and the choices we make. And sometimes those decisions can lead us to very dark places.

For many years now I’ve had the privilege of living and working in Wiltshire. It’s a county that encompasses some of the most magical landscape in the country. But it’s also one of the most frequently overlooked. Every year thousands of holiday makers make their way through Wiltshire on their way to the delights of Devon and Cornwall, most of them giving little more than a passing glance at this ancient county. But it’s a county that holds many secrets. It’s littered with more ancient sites per square mile than virtually any other place on the planet.

Those places include the two extraordinary landscapes that I’m privileged to spend my days working in as the National Trust Archaeologist for the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. But the deep past that suffuses Wiltshire stretches well beyond the boundaries of these two landscapes. Bronze Age burial mounds, Roman Villas, Saxon cemeteries, Norman castles, Gothic cathedrals and Iron Age hill forts jockey for space alongside the great megalithic monuments of our Neolithic ancestors.

For those of us who live in this ancient shire the past is ever present. And it affects our daily lives in ways that we’re often not even wholly aware of. It’s that ever present effect of both the deep past and the more recent past on how people think about the place they call home and how they act as a consequence that I wanted to explore in The Hidden Bones.

There is folklore and legends aplenty here but there’s sometimes something darker too. Making a life on or from the land has many pleasures but the rural life isn’t always a bucolic idyll. Life in a small village on the uplands of the Marlborough Downs or Salisbury Plain can be every bit as tough as the inner city. The challenges are just different.

As an archaeologist I’ve worked in many landscapes across many countries. I’ve seen the effects of how people have carved out their lives on the bones of the land, and their choices always leave their trace for the next generation. They bequeath us a many layered inheritance that shapes the future in ways that they couldn’t possibly have imagined. In The Hidden Bones, when archaeologists Clare Hills and David Barbrook start to strip away those layers, they reveal a past that none of them had expected and within which lies the darkest of secrets. A secret that someone will go to any lengths to protect.                                                                                           © Nicola Ford, 2018

My Review

Recently widowed, Clare is feeling rather lost at having to cope on her own after years of  happy marriage. The death of her husband was both sudden and unexpected. When her old university friend, David, contacts her about getting involved in his research project, it seems like the perfect distraction from her grief and also an opportunity to rekindle her love of archaeology.

Initially, I wasn’t sure I shared Clare and David’s excitement at the discovery of a missing artefact as they comb through the papers of deceased archaeologist, Gerald Hart, famed for his work on the Hungerbourne Barrow.   However, that all changed when the pair make a startling discovery about one of the finds in the collection. It brings to light revelations from the past that although historic definitely do not relate to the Bronze Age. I was now hooked.

History starts to repeat itself in other ways as the excavation team led by David and Clare are plagued by graffiti warning messages and accidents on site, just as occurred at the time of the original excavation. But are they actually just accidents or are they manifestations of an ancient curse or something more sinister but distinctly earthbound?  When events turn darker and more dangerous still, it becomes clear that there is someone who will stop at nothing to prevent the excavation continuing.

The author certainly kept me guessing about who the culprit was. One minute I was sure I knew who was responsible, the next minute I was convinced it was someone else. Eventually the perpetrator and their motive is revealed but not before lucky escapes for some members of the team and just the opposite for others.

It turns out archaeology has much in common with the investigation of a crime. They both involve gathering and piecing together evidence, investigating available source information, testing assumptions and coming to conclusions. A crime scene must be preserved in the same way as an archaeological excavation site. Because of the author’s background, the details about the excavation and the archaeological procedures felt completely authentic.  I also got the same sense about David’s tussles with his university head of department over the need to deliver research funding that appears to be such a feature of modern day academia.

What I particularly enjoyed about the book was the strong cast of female characters – Clare, obviously, but also Margaret and Jo. Along with David, the author has lined up an interesting team for future books in the series.   The Hidden Bones is an engrossing murder mystery with engaging characters that will appeal to lovers of crime fiction, fans of TV’s Time Team or those with an interest in history or archaeology.

I received an uncorrected proof copy courtesy of publishers, Allison and Busby, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Suspenseful, engrossing, mystery

Try something similar…The Dark Angel by Elly Griffiths

Nicola FordAbout the Author

Nicola Ford is the pen-name for archaeologist Dr Nick Snashall, National Trust Archaeologist for the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Through her day-job and now her writing, she’s spent more than most people thinking about the dead. Her writing brings together the worlds of archaeology and crime, unravelling the tangled threads left behind by murder to reveal the stories of those who can no longer speak for themselves.

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