Information about the book
An unlikely heroine. An even more unlikely detective. And a cold case that's resurfacing with deadly consequences. The next book from 'the world's greatest storyteller' (Guardian ).
Tokyo, Japan
Umiko Wada has had enough excitement in life. With an overbearing mother and her husband recently murdered, she just wants to keep her head down. As a secretary to a private detective, her life is pleasantly filled with coffee runs and paperwork.
That is, until her boss takes on a new case. A case that is surrounded by shadows. A case that means Wada will have to leave Tokyo and travel to London.
London, England
Nick Miller never knew his father, and was always told he wasn't missing much. But when an old friend of his late mother says there are things that Nick needs to know about his parents, he can't ignore it.
When a chance encounter brings Wada and Nick together, they couldn't know the series of violent events set off by their investigations. And when they discover Nick's father might have been the only witness to a dark secret forever buried, they realise there are some powerful people who will do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
EXTRACT
ONE
Umikwada wasn’t a private detective. She just worked for one. She answered his phone, managed his accounts, kept his records, talked through problems with him, greeted his visitors, fetched him bento-boxed lunches and made him tea, which he’d taken to drinking virtually all day now he’d supposedly given up smoking.
The sign on the door of the seventh-f loor office in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo where Wada spent her working days described it as the premises of the Kodaka Detective Agency. But there was only one detective in the agency: fifty- eight-year-old Kazuto Kodaka. There’d been several detectives, apparently, when Kodaka senior was in charge. But his son pre- ferred to operate alone. What would happen if and when his body collapsed under the strain of his unhealthy habits and chronic overwork was easy to predict. Wada would need a new job. Which wasn’t a happy thought. She liked this job. It suited her.
She always thought of herself as Wada rather than Umiko because that was how Kodaka referred to her. It had seemed disrespectful at first. Now she was rather fond of it. It reinforced an image of herself she’d honed over years of being alone. Simple, strong, independent. That was Wada. Umiko was a girl she’d once been. The Wada she’d become was nearly forty-seven, though she looked younger, probably because, as her mother regularly reminded her, she’d never had children to raise and worry over.
That wasn’t Wada’s fault, as her mother used to acknowledge but now seemed inclined to forget. She was a widow. Her hus- band Tomohiko – Hiko, as she’d called him and still did, in the privacy of her own thoughts – had been killed in the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway back in 1995, though technically he hadn’t actually died until twelve years later. The decade and a bit he’d spent in a coma froze Wada’s life. Her mother had still hoped, when he finally expired, that Wada would find some- body else to marry. But it had never happened.
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by Robert Goddard
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