Buddha Kiss - Softcover

Tasker, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385485522 ISBN 13: 9780385485524

Publisher: Doubleday, 1997

Synopsis

The New York Times called Peter Tasker's first thriller, Silent Thunder, "pure entertainment" that "pulls out all the fictional stops yet does so convincingly." With Buddha Kiss, Tasker takes his sophisticated brand of suspense to a whole new level.

Richard Mitchell used quick wits and a degree in Japanese Studies to turn his job as a bike messenger in central London into a position as securities analyst in Tokyo. Those wits should help make him a financial whiz-kid -if his career isn't ruined first by his having to recommend the underwriting of a run-down company at the insistence of his new boss, Yazawa, a strange, mercurial man who seemed to appear out of the blue three months ago. Meanwhile, Kazuo Mori, a maverick private eye in the world's most conformist society, is trying to retain his independence as he investigates the murder of a friend's daughter. His inquiries seem to be leading him toward the radical Peace Technology cult-it's just that any time he makes progress, somebody tries to kill him.

These are minor tremors from a disruption deep in Japan's unstable structure, a disruption so deep-from huge financial fraud to the narcotic ambitions of a religious zealot-so lethally crazy and so diabolically organized, it will destroy and reshape worlds.

Buddha Kiss is a superlative thriller with echoes of the Kobe earthquake, the Nick Leeson/Barings scandal, and the Tokyo subway gas attacks-though it was, uncannily, written before any of these stories made news. Gritty, fast-paced, filled with unique characters, and absolutely sizzling with the oddities and obsessions of Tokyo life, Buddha Kiss is a vivid journey to the complex heart of Japan

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From the Inside Flap

w York Times</i> called Peter Tasker's first thriller, <i>Silent Thunder</i>, "pure entertainment" that "pulls out all the fictional stops yet does so convincingly." With Buddha Kiss, Tasker takes his sophisticated brand of suspense to a whole new level.<br><br>Richard Mitchell used quick wits and a degree in Japanese Studies to turn his job as a bike messenger in central London into a position as securities analyst in Tokyo. Those wits should help make him a financial whiz-kid -if his career isn't ruined first by his having to recommend the underwriting of a run-down company at the insistence of his new boss, Yazawa, a strange, mercurial man who seemed to appear out of the blue three months ago. Meanwhile, Kazuo Mori, a maverick private eye in the world's most conformist society, is trying to retain his independence as he investigates the murder of a friend's daughter. His inquiries seem to be leading him toward the radical Peace Technology cult-it's just that any t

Reviews

In his second outing, Tokyo p.i. Kazuo Mori (Silent Thunder, 1992) unwittingly takes on some of modern Japan's most powerful constituencies: organized crime, the shadowy figures who move in- country securities markets, and cultists. When asked by a casual friend to investigate the mysterious death of his daughter, Mori gets appreciably more than he bargained for. The trail soon leads him to a quasi-religious sect called Peace Technology, whose charismatic but unstable sansei is known only as Ono. In search of answers, the stubbornly independent detective (who was expelled from a prestigious university 25 years earlier for his radicalism) infiltrates the group. At the same time, Rick Mitchell, an ambitious young Yorkshireman working as a junior analyst in the Tokyo branch of an American brokerage firm, is ordered by his flamboyant boss Terumasa Yazawa to draft an upbeat report on Otaman Corp., a down-at-the-heels trading house that's about to float a megabuck bond issue. Worried, Mitch checks more closely on the uncommunicative company. What he doesn't learn until almost too late is that the fast-fading mini-conglomerate has effectively been taken over by the Yakuza (Dai Nihon's Mafia), which is using it as cover for the manufacture of a designer drug dubbed ``Buddha Kiss.'' Ono is in on the deal as well, using the hallucinogenic downer as a means of keeping his followers in line. Mitch, getting too close to the truth with his independent inquiries, is abducted and spirited to Oshima, an island in the Sagami Sea where Mori is undergoing indoctrination with other Peace Technology recruits. Marked for liquidation, Mori and Mitchell join forces at the eleventh hour to escape the clutches of their captors and liberate the brainwashed cultists. Another engrossing and illuminating thriller from Tasker, an expatriate British securities executive who understands that the world's most homogeneous and obedient society has a rather full measure of outlaws. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385485522
• ISBN 13: 9780385485524
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448