The Spy Across the Table

Barry Lancet’s Japantown (2016) introduced readers to Asian art dealer/Japanese detective agency owner Jim Brodie and both his divergent firms—one in San Francisco, the other in Tokyo—readily making available a cornucopia of possible plots that could occur in the US or Japan, or both, and by no means restricted to either locale. Lancet followed this intriguing debut with Tokyo Kill (2015), in which a veteran Japanese soldier comes to Brodie in Tokyo, certain that his friends and former unit are systematically being murdered, putting a WWII twist to the plot and making readers wonder to what degree Japanese culture still labors under the weight of that particular history.