Lady Joker

Looking back on the books I read this year, the theme is really that I've read several "first in a series" books, and I've very little desire to carry on reading any of those series.

This book is a Japanese crime thriller. The first half is a quite fun, slightly quirky "getting the gang together" sort of affair. They plan to kidnap a top executive of a big beer company. Then, Reservoir Dogs style, we jump over the actual committing of the crime. Unlike Reservoir Dogs, we do not follow the same group of characters after the crime as we did before. Instead, we are now following various police and journalist characters who are trying to figure out what happened. This second half is glacially slow. Very little happens. None of the characters are interesting or distinctive. It's unclear why everyone is taking seriously the threat this group poses to the fortunes of a huge corporation. Maybe something is lost in translation and there's some element of distinctively Japanese corporate culture or organised crime culture that makes it plausible that this group who let their kidnap victim go ought to be paid off.

And then the book just ends? There's a second volume, I'm not sure it's out in English yet. I don't care, I won't be reading it. But it's all very unsatisfying. Even by the standards of first-in-a-series, there's just no resolution at all to any of the strands that are running through the second half of the book. And we never check in with the characters of the first half, who were at least interesting and varied.

I've given this two and a half stars, mainly because I did enjoy the first half of the book. I slogged through the second half hoping for some kind of closure or resolution, and I was disappointed.