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The Last Train
The Last Train
The Last Train
Ebook398 pages4 hours

The Last Train

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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In Tokyo, murder’s easy to hide.
Detective Hiroshi Shimizu investigates white collar crime in Tokyo. 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 might be a woman. 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.



How do you find one woman in the biggest city in the world?


Takamatsu drags Hiroshi out to the hostess clubs and skyscraper offices of Tokyo in search of the killer. Hiroshi goes deeper and deeper into Tokyo’s intricate, perilous market for buying and selling the most expensive land in the world. He teams up with ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi to scour Tokyo’s sacred temples, corporate offices and industrial wastelands to find out why one woman was driven to murder.


“A terrific thriller.” Blue Ink Review


“An absorbing investigation.” Kirkus Reviews


“Gripping and suspenseful.” Booklife


“An utterly, page-turning adventure,” Forward Reviews



After years in America and lost in neat, clean spreadsheets, Hiroshi confronts the stark realities of the biggest city in the world, where inside information can travel in a flash from the insiders at top investment firms to street-level punks and teenage hostesses, everyone scrambling for their cut of Tokyo’s lucrative land deals.


 


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.


 

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 14, 2020
ISBN9781942410195
Author

Michael Pronko

Michael Pronko is an award-winning, Tokyo-based writer of murder, memoir and music. His writings on Tokyo life and his taut character-driven mysteries have won critics’ awards and five-star reviews. Kirkus Reviews called his second novel, The Moving Blade, “An elegant balance of Japanese customs with American-style hard-boiled procedural” and selected it for their Best Books of 2018.Michael also runs the website, Jazz in Japan, about the vibrant jazz scene in Tokyo and Yokohama. He has written regular columns about Japanese culture, art, jazz, society and politics for Newsweek Japan, The Japan Times, Artscape Japan, Jazznin, and ST Shukan. He has also appeared on NHK and Nippon Television.A philosophy major, Michael traveled for years, ducking in and out of graduate schools, before finishing his PhD on Charles Dickens and film, and settling in Tokyo as a professor of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University. He teaches contemporary American novels, film adaptations, music and art.

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Rating: 3.8499999799999998 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    WHAT A RIVETING STORY TO SINK YOUR TEETH INTO! I could hardly read fast enough to see what happened next. Hiroshi still longed for Linda after she left him high and dry, but there were only so many ways he could explain why when he solved a case that he would celebrate with his co-workers. I liked his dogged determination to capture the person throwing drunk men in front of a train. I suffered with young Michiko struggling to get time with her dad as her mom had died and she was lonely. I cheered when she took defense lesson as a child, but as an adult, she was kidnapped and sexual abused.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This tension-filled, atmospheric, and evil-infused thriller set in one of my favorite places in the world was so worth waiting for. All about money—the getting and losing of it, the revenge over it, the need, the greed, and the kinks it puts in people—this plot engine was well decorated with great characters, living through actions and not flat descriptions. Loved the dramatic irony of knowing the villainess while the characters do not--her horrendous secret, once revealed, went a long way to understanding her motivation. Pronko's feel for Japanese culture, where business is done via connection and (often "inside") information in Japan, Mitsuko’s sidewinding sinuousness, strength, and flexibility—both physical and psychological—made her the perfect villain. The leitmotif of her lotus perfume fit the settings with bar-hostess luxuries, “delivery health girls,” love hotels, and famous coffee shops like the Almond Roppongi, that give a full-immersion reading experience.Details, like how special chopsticks are used at certain accident scenes, the role of drugs-in-drinks, the mind-boggling Venus Fort, a foreign-city-themed shopping center for women, or the Maman spider sculpture in the middle of an outdoor plaza, add to the wonderful fascination of this world.Expat life--the Japanese yearning for it in America—and American indulgence in it in Japan, was brilliantly painted.No car chases, but great on-foot chases! And very clever ways of describing the foreign scene with words that make sense to Westerners: “organic chaos of old Tokyo”; or, of the neon marquees in Tokyo, they “climbed the buildings like electric ivy.”The “chikan” plot thread was spotty and I didn’t get its role in the whole plot, and, being familiar with Tokyo, I found characters’ names the same as well-known areas disconcerting (Ueno, Shibuya, Sugamo, Osaki (just one letter off) but otherwise this page-turner made me hope for a new Pronko novel soon!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a very interesting mystery. I learned things about Japan that I never knew. I liked Detective Hiroshi. He was a great character. This had many twists and turns. It was hard not to like the bad guy in this book also. I hope to read more books in this series. I received a copy of this book from Smith Publicity for a fair and honest opinion that I gave of my own free will.

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The Last Train - Michael Pronko

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