The Noh Mask Murder by Akimitsu Tagaki

First published in Japan in 1949; published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo on June 4, 2024

Locked room mysteries are an abundant staple of Japanese crime fiction. The Noh Mask Murder is a classic example. Akimitsu Takagi published the novel shortly after World War II. A protagonist alludes to Japan’s collective shame, but the story is about murder rather than war or politics.

Akimitsu Takagi is the novel’s initial narrator. In 1946, he tells his old friend Koichi Yanagi about his idea of writing a detective story based on his firsthand account of solving an actual crime, making the novel a detective memoir. Koichi is staying at the mansion of Taijiro Chizui, whose father was a professor and also Koichi’s mentor. Taijiro’s father died of a heart attack ten years earlier. Unfortunately for the Chizui family, he may have hidden a family fortune before he died.

By chance, Koichi encounters another old friend outside Taijiro’s mansion. The friend is now a public prosecutor. They see a demon in one of the mansion’s windows and meet with Taijiro to investigate. They discover that the demon is actually a fearsome Noh mask that, according to legend, was cursed by a Noh actor.

Akimitsu gets his chance to investigate a crime when Koichi gives his name to Taijiro. Taijiro phones Koichi and tells him he has learned who is behind the mask. Akimitsu agrees to meet him immediately. Unfortunately, an “invisible killer” takes Taijiro’s life before Akimitsu can meet with him.

Taijiro died inside a locked bedroom from an apparent heart attack. The Noh mask was found on the floor. The body has been sprinkled with jasmine-scented perfume. Someone had ordered the delivery of three coffins in advance of Taijiro’s death. Before long, three coffins fall short of the family’s needs.

Akimitsu cannot solve the crimes, but the public prosecutor eventually sends him a journal — a detective memoir — that unravels the mystery. The journal was written by Koichi. After he provides a lesson in Noh theater and reviews the literature of locked room mysteries, Koichi introduces members of the Chizui family, including a madwoman who plays the piano and a monstrous man named Rintaro who scorns humanity. Only Sawako seems normal, but at 28, never permitted to love or marry, she is expected to be the lady of the house, little more than a glorified maid. Sawako’s dreams about the mask put her in fear for Koichi’s life.

One of the armchair detectives favors Sawako as the prime suspect. The other believes Rintaro to be the culprit, yet suspects abound. Several clues are found in a poem in the madwoman’s diary. A note written in shorthand provides another. An STD provides a clue that adds the possibility of incest to a dark plot. A key clue is in the phrase (repeated by two ill-fated characters) “eighty-eight in eighty-two” followed by the word Portia.

Koichi works out the locked room mystery, deduces how each victim was made to die from a heart attack, and discovers the killer’s identity while a third of the story remains to be told. The novel ends with a letter from the prosecutor, written after Koichi finished his journal, that adds a twist to Koichi’s account of the murder. A postscript to the letter adds a final surprising revelation that completes the story. As is common in Japanese mysteries, the plot is intricate and no plot threads are left dangling.

Greed or revenge are the likely motives for the murders, depending upon the killer’s identity. Takagi offers philosophical discussions about the difference between revenge and justice, illustrated with examples from feudal Japan, including the 47 Ronin. Takagi leaves it to the reader to decide whether revenge might justify the killings (or some of them) that fill the pages of The Noh Mask Murder.

Crime fiction fans don’t need to be locked room mystery fans to appreciate The Noh Mask Murder. The locked room is almost a sideshow. The story is akin to the traditional mystery in which all the suspects are assembled in a room while the detective talks through the clues and reveals the killer’s identity. Takagi provides enough suspects to keep the reader guessing as Koichi works his way through the possibilities. It is the ending, however, that gives the mystery its classic nature by forcing the reader to rethink an apparently sound solution to the killer’s identity.

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Godwin by Joseph O'Neill

Published by Pantheon on June 4, 2024

A character named Jean-Luc Lefebvre pontificates that “Sport is recreational and therefore optional. Nobody is under a duty to like it. Either it interests you or it doesn’t.” The sport that most of the world calls football has never interested me, although I have friends (most of whom were born outside of the US) who are passionate about the sport Americans call soccer. The trick that great storytellers conjure is making a reader care about a topic that is of little interest to them. Joseph O’Neill did that in Godwin, a book that is built around a potential soccer star from one of the world’s poorest nations.

While soccer is part of the novel's foundation, Godwin is more broadly about people and cultures that, while vastly different from each other in many ways, are united by the twin forces of soccer and corruption.At its heart, and more importantly, Godwin is about family, a fluid term that has differing and changing meanings.

The first section of Godwin is narrated by Mark Wolfe. Mark is a technical writer specializing in grant applications. He generally works from home and prefers to stay at home because travel and adventures “boil down to a sequence of uncontrollable, unpleasant, and unwanted events.” Those words turn out to be prescient.

Mark lives in Pittsburg and works in a cooperative of technical writers. An incident of rude behavior at his office — the kind of thing he usually avoids by working from home — is resolved by his agreement to take a leave of absence. Mark’s half-brother, Geoff Anibal, contacts him as his leave begins and asks for his help with a project in London. Mark doesn’t like Geoff but Mark’s wife Sushila convinces him that it would be good for him to spend time with his brother. Mark takes a trip to England to learn what Geoff wants. Their mutual mother lives in France but Mark has no desire to rekindle his relationship with her.

Geoff’s gig involves identifying promising soccer players (primarily from disadvantaged nations) and hooking them up with European teams. He describes himself as an intermediary or agent, depending on the services he provides, which seem to be scant. Geoff sends Mark on an adventure. It is an adventure that Mark must fund, knowing that Geoff’s promises to reimburse his expenses will come to nothing. The mission is to find a promising young soccer player named Godwin who lives in an unknown African nation and whose existence and prowess are only confirmed by a few minutes of video.

Mark’s mission generates about half the novel’s plot. In a manic mood, Mark enlists an aging French soccer agent (Lefebvre) as his partner. The partnership does not go as Mark planned. Lefebvre competes with Geoff to be the liveliest character and is by far the best storyteller.

The other half of the plot is centered on the cooperative that helps Mark earn his livelihood. Most sections of the novel that advance the plot thread are narrated by Lakesha Williams, a medical writer in the writer’s co-op. Her narrative fleshes out the cooperative’s key members, including Mark, who returns to work after his European adventure with renewed energy and purpose. Internal politics leads to a leadership change that Mark soon regrets and that leaves Lakesha feeling threatened. She will later experience conflict between her commitment to the ideals of the cooperative movement — “solidarity, self-responsibility, equity” — and her fading tolerance for new group members who are driven by a self-absorbed drive for power and dominance.

O’Neill fills the lives and backgrounds of significant characters with interesting details, from Lakesha’s initial reluctance to leave north Milwaukee to Lefebvre’s encyclopedic knowledge of soccer history. O’Neill details the cultural and political differences of the African nations that Lefebvre scouts for soccer talent. While this could the dull content of a treatise, O’Neill’s lively prose keeps the story in constant motion.

In subtle ways, O’Neill explores the world’s enduring difficulty with tribalism. One example is the co-op’s devolution from a group of supportive individuals working toward common goals to a group of battling factions. Another is the complaint of a German resident about the influx of Africans who disturb the established (white) order in his native land by increasing the demand for resources that the established order would rather not share. Another is his discussion of African nations in conflict. Far right complaints about “globalism” are reflected in conflicts between tribalism and cooperation.

In more direct ways, O’Neill explores the importance of family. Apart from Geoff, family members take on more prominent roles in the novel’s second half. Mark tolerates Suchila’s father, a racist Tamil immigrant, but he’s surprised when Suchila interferes with his family relationships by engaging in email correspondence with his mother. Surprising events tie together Mark’s mother, Geoff, Lefebre, and Mark. The story also touches upon Lakesha’s difficult relationship with her sister in Milwaukee.

We have families into which we are born, families we make for ourselves, and families that we fall into without giving the process much thought. Those concepts of family are each represented here. O’Neill recognizes that no two families are alike, but they have features in common, ranging from love and responsibility to resentment and exploitation.

The intertwined plot threads in Godwin — the search for Godwin and unrest at the co-op — come together to tell a captivating story. A surprise near the end upsets both plot threads, but they never unravel. Characters are forced to change but they endure because that’s what people do, regardless of culture or nationality. Sometimes they endure with the help of family, other times in spite of family strife. O’Neill’s ability to tell a story that is both familiar and different from any other I’ve read makes Godwin one of my favorite novels of 2024.

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Happy Memorial Day

If Something Happens to Me by Alex Finlay

Published by ‎ Minotaur Books on May 28, 2024

If Something Happens to Me weaves together stories of crime and bullying. One crime involves Alison Lane. She is preparing to make out (or more) with Ryan Richardson, her high school boyfriend, when a man clobbers Ryan. Because Alison disappears, the police suspect that Ryan killed her. Ryan can only remember that the man who attacked him was missing his pinky fingers, a detail the police regard as fanciful.

The police can’t pin a crime on Ryan, but most members of his Kansas community assume that Ryan is a killer. They engage in the cherished American pastime of harassing him with self-righteous venom, even after evidence miraculously appears that links Alison’s disappearance to a serial killer.

When Ryan goes to college, he changes his last name. Then he changes colleges. His past catches up with him when, as a law student at Georgetown, he visits Italy on a trip taken annually by top law students.

The other crime story grows out of the bullying of a boy at a private school attended by the children of wealthy parents. Anthony doesn’t respond well to the bullying. Neither does his father, Shane O’Leary, once Shane learns about it. Shane is the head of a Philadelphia crime family. He doesn’t appreciate the school’s attempt to cover up the harassment of his son. O’Leary’s accountant, Michael Harper, is also integral to the story for reasons that can’t be revealed without spoiling one of the plot’s many twists.

The novel’s protagonist is Poppy McGee, who took a job as a deputy sheriff in Kansas after her abrupt discharge from the military for punching an officer. She’s back in her hometown with her brother Dash and a father who is battling cancer. Her first big case involves a car that is pulled from the lake. Alison Lane was apparently abducted from the car, but the two bodies in the car are both male. Both died from gunshot wounds. But where is Alison?

Poppy soon learns that someone in the Sheriff’s Department is misleading her. She also suspects that Dash and her father know more about Alison’s disappearance than they’re telling her. The Sheriff has told her not to cooperate with FBI Agent Jane Fincher, but it isn’t clear why she’s been given that command.

The story threads eventually come together, although it takes some time to understand the relative time frames that make a unified story possible. The well-constructed plot achieves a satisfying degree of complexity without becoming convoluted. Poppy and the reader must decide which characters are worthy of trust. The answers to that question and to some of the novel’s mysteries may be surprising.

The story develops at a good pace. This isn’t an action novel, but Alex Finlay builds suspense by placing characters in danger. Self-sacrifice and redemption give the reader reasons to feel good about a couple of bad characters. The good characters are likable and the plot is more credible than is typical of modern thrillers. All of that adds up to an enjoyable read.

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Camino Ghosts by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on May 28, 2024

John Grisham is at his best when he works racial injustice into his stories. In a 2022 interview, Grisham said he “grew up in the Jim Crow South. A very segregated, racist society was almost in my DNA. It’s a long struggle to overcome that and to look back at the way I was raised and not be resentful toward my parents and other people who helped raise me for their extreme racism. It was such a hard right-wing, racist society that I grew up in.”

Camino Ghosts is Grisham’s third novel set on Camino Island, a fictional location off the northeast coast of Florida. A central character is a descendent of slaves. The novel reminds the reader that Florida entered the union as a slave state. I assume that will be enough to get the novel banned in Florida’s school libraries because Ron DeSantis thinks it is wrong to offend the imagined sensibilities of white children by teaching them the truth about southern history. Most rational people believe children should be taught to learn from the past, but denial and ignorance are the preferred tools of education in today’s Florida.

The descendent in question is Lovely Jackson. Now about 80 years old, Lovely lives on Camino Island but was born on a nearby island that the locals call Dark Isle. The island is said to be haunted and enough people have died after venturing to the island that the legends are cautiously regarded as true.

Lovely wrote a book that recounted the oral history her ancestries passed down about their lives. The first island settlers had been captured in Africa for sale into slavery. A few Africans survived a shipwreck, killed the white survivors who enslaved them, and protected their new island home from white men.

Nalla was one of the survivors. Lovely is one of Nalla’s descendants. Nalla was raped by one of the slave traders and was pregnant with his child. She used the witchcraft she learned in her childhood to place a curse on the island. White men who set foot on the island are doomed. The curse has so far been completely effective.

Developers are itching to get their hands on Dark Isle because it has a beach. Until Hurricane Leo, building a bridge to the island was impractical. The hurricane changed the topography, making it possible for Tidal Breeze, an unscrupulous real estate developer, to demand that the state pay for a bridge so it can fill the beaches with condos for rich people. Most local residents are tired of developments that displace less affluent people with wealthy condo dwellers, although a few are persuaded that development brings economic benefits that outweigh the environmental destruction that has devastated Florida.

Steven Mahon is an environmental lawyer who wants to throw a wrench in Tidal Breeze’s plan to bulldoze Dark Isle. He realizes that, as the last inhabitant of Dark Isle, Nalla may have a claim to ownership of the island through adverse possession. Proving that Nalla owns the island would be the quickest way to prevent Tidal Breze from destroying it. The problem is that Nalla has no corroborating evidence to prove that she was born on Dark Isle or that her ancestors ever lived there. The state claims ownership of all uninhabited islands near Florida and Tidal Breeze has engineered a behind-the-scenes sweetheart deal to buy it from the state.

The story follows two characters who appeared in earlier Camino Island novels. Bruce Cable owns a successful independent bookstore that caters to island residents and tourists. Mercer Mann is a novelist who spends part of the year on the island. Mercer decides that Lovely has a story worth telling. Bruce is a fan of Lovely’s self-published book about the island and is responsible for the few sales that Lovely made. He encourages Mercer to tell Lovely’s story in a work of nonfiction and to bring Tidal Breeze into the narrative.

Political corruption and environmental destruction are two of the novel’s themes, from Tidal Breeze’s attempt to influence a judge to its use of campaign contributions to assure that state officials ignore the environmental consequences of its development projects. The larger theme is Florida’s history as a slave state and the continuing impact that slavery has had on the state’s Black residents. I was particularly moved by Lovely’s testimony that she wanted to tell her story because so many stories of slaves have not been told — a truth that seems particularly evident in Florida, where a majority of the state’s legislators seem to believe that stories about white slaveowners are best forgotten.

I am hot and cold on Grisham, but I enjoyed the trial scenes in Camino Ghosts. Lovely is a fun and sympathetic character. The plot is simple but compelling. The present day story might be too upbeat to be credible, but Grisham balances the good feelings with the harrowing reality of the slave trade. My primary reason for giving Camino Ghosts a strong recommendation is that it is so different from most legal thrillers. It’s always good to read something fresh in a genre that tends to rehash stale plots.

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