As I've mentioned in earlier blog posts, the late Japanese crime fiction writer, Akimitsu Takagi has four novels translated into English. Two of these four feature State Prosecutor Saburo Kirishima and are part of a seven part series. The Informer is the second in this series.
In The Informer, a former Tokyo stock exchange worker, Shigeo Segawa, is fired because of illegal trades. Segawa accepts a job from an old friend and discovers that this new firm is actually an agency for industrial espionage.
Early on, I was beginning to think that The Informer was strictly a story about industrial espionage and not a murder mystery. It takes a while before a murder takes place in the novel.
The story turns out to be more complicated than I originally suspected. The circumstantial evidence builds against Shigeo Segawa, so naturally I assumed that Segawa would not be the killer, although figuring out who the actual killer might be wasn't so easy.
Upon finishing The Informer, I'll move on to the third book in the Prosecutor Saburo Kirishima series, Honeymoon to Nowhere.
It doesn't appear that there will be additional translations of Takagi's work and at 72, I'm too old to learn enough Japanese to read the entire series. That's unfortunate.
No comments:
Post a Comment