Blue Light Yokohama
-
-
3.7 • 7 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Newly reinstated to the Homicide Division and transferred to a precinct in Tokyo, Inspector Iwata is facing superiors who don’t want him there and is assigned a recalcitrant partner, Noriko Sakai, who’d rather work with anyone else. After the previous detective working the case killed himself, Iwata and Sakai are assigned to investigate the slaughter of an entire family, a brutal murder with no clear motive or killer. At the crime scene, they find puzzling ritualistic details. Black smudges. A strange incense smell. And a symbol—a large black sun. Iwata doesn’t know what the symbol means but he knows what the killer means by it: I am here. I am not finished.
As Iwata investigates, it becomes clear that these murders by the Black Sun Killer are not the first, nor the last attached to that symbol. As he tries to track down the history of black sun symbol, puzzle out the motive for the crime, and connect this to other murders, Iwata finds himself racing another clock—the superiors who are trying to have him removed for good.
Haunted by his own past, his inability to sleep, and a song, ‘Blue Light Yokohama,’ Iwata is at the center of a compelling, brilliantly moody, layered novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After a tantalizing prologue, Obreg n maintains a high level of suspense throughout his superior fiction debut, an intricately constructed whodunit that doesn't sacrifice depth of characterization for plot. One day in 1996, policeman Hideo Akashi and his wife are riding a cable car in the Nagasaki Prefecture when a woman attempts to open the car door. After stabbing the attendant who tries to stop her, she succeeds in opening the door and jumps out. Akashi manages to grab her by the arm, but after seeing a tattoo on her wrist of a large black sun, he lets her plummet to her death. Fifteen years later, Akashi, a respected Tokyo police inspector, jumps to his death off a bridge. Akashi had been investigating the murders of the Kaneshiros, parents and two children, who were butchered in their home by a killer who removed the father's heart. The case passes to Inspector Iwata, who notices a drawing of a black sun on the ceiling of the bedroom where one of the victims was found. While the complex mystery itself will keep readers turning pages, the book's real strength is Iwata, a compellingly tormented lead, whose demons don't prevent him from doggedly pursuing the truth.
