Kazuo Mori, PI, is struggling to make ends meet. When he falls in with a prostitute called Angel, he is soon struggling for survival in a vicious game that has the Yakuza and Japan’s two major computer game makers as players. And on top of everything else, there is the rival agency that’s just set up and is undercutting him on every job. The only thing to do is set up in partnership with the eager young student who is taking his business. And it’s an arrangement with some unexpected bonuses.

From Publishers Weekly

Let's take this out on a limb. Let's say Tasker's third novel (after Silent Thunder and Buddha Kiss) set in urban Japan in the 1990s is one of the best hardboiled detective novels ever written. Let's say Tasker himself is one of the smartest writers in the genre: book smart, in the remarkable lyrical quality of his prose or the frequent brilliance of his imagery; street-smart, like Elmore Leonard, in that his streets and the often terrible people that walk them are so mundanely real; socio-economic smart, in that his dark, almost heartbreaking, depiction of Japanese society is so believable. One feels that outside the novel's action, his characters are real people leading normal lives. A Tokyo-based British writer and partner in a money management firm, Tasker puts his knowledge of Japanese business to fine use. Detective Kazuo Mori, a former youthful rebel whose indignation at social injustice has mellowed into a weary acquiescence, is a tough guy only when necessary. He gets his information by deception, pretending to be a figure of authority. His investigation into the alleged natural death of a government official leads him into the most secret places in Japanese society: corporate files. Angel, a young woman he rescues from a Yakuza boss, may appear to be a damsel in distress, but God help anyone who crosses her. Both she and Mori are pursued by a Yakuza hitman, George the Wolf Nishio, who like so many of Leonard's criminals is frighteningly real. The publicity citing U.K. reviews plays up the Japanese manga comic books angle, but this is pure American hardboiled and it's outstanding.

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