Brief Mention: Volume Two of LADY JOKER from Kaoru Takamura Has Released

Were you (are you still?) a Godfather fan as all the books came out? Do you love long novels that probe history, culture, and crime? Have a special interest in Japan, with its sharp differences from Western life?

Great! LADY JOKER by Kaoru Takamura is meant for you ... and will keep your bedside table occupied for months ahead.

The first volume of this sprawling epic, which Takamura builds from a real unsolved kidnapping case that took over Japanese news for two years, was released in the US by Soho Press in May 2021 under its Soho Crime imprint. At 576 pages, in small type with narrow page margins, it marked a return to "long publishing" intended for committed readers. The characters and plot twists are compelling -- so Volume 2, which came out a couple of weeks ago (588 pages!), provides the delight and relief of bringing the story to its cynical and thrilling conclusion.

Here's a sample from Goda's investigation in Volume 2:

He didn't feel like hearing Hirase's voice, so Goda jotted down on a blank report—Attn: Sergeant Hirase. Anonymous tip-off call to my residence at 11:50 p.m. Male caller. "I'm giving you the telephone number being used for contact between Hinode and LJ." The number reported is as follows: 3751-921 ... Signed, Goda—and faxed it to Special Investigation Headquarters.

Only after he looked back at the page that he had just sent did Goda realize that he recognized the 3751 exchange because it fell within his precinct's jurisdiction.

Or this, from the viewpoint of Monoi:

He gazed at the girl's peaceful face muscles relaxed in sleep. The fiend was still murmuring inside his belly, but even that gradually came to sound more like the meaningless chant of a sutra, and Monoi tried convincing himself at last—I no longer need an escape. Now I would rather stay a fiend until I die. I must remain a fiend.

As you can see, translators Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell do a masterful job of bringing the novel into English, without losing the flavor of Japan. Mark off time to read this pair ... or spend your entire winter walking with the crime and investigation in all their haunting flavor.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Brief Mention: LADY JOKER, Volume 1 of Kaoru Takamura's Japanese Crime Epic

LADY JOKER came out in mid April with many thoughtful reviews. At 576 pages, it's far from beach reading. Even the reviews have been on the long side -- really, they have to be. One of the most enjoyable articles on the book's release from Soho Press is this interview with editor and publisher (and author) Juliet Grames, full of its own twists. From the true-crime basis of the three-volume epic (the Glico-Morinaga case of the 1980s) to the challenges of translation, the interview itself is compelling.

Though LADY JOKER is a suspense novel and came out under the Soho Crime imprint, it also fits two other notable descriptions: It's obviously the Japanese version of the Godfather series, rich with the frictions of Japan's own caste system and the criminal temptations of corporate greed and advantage, framed around a high-stakes kidnapping. And it's a scorching indictment of capitalist manipulations of both government and society—one that could as easily apply to America or today's Russia as it does to Japan. If the love of money is the root of evil, Kaoru Takamura's portrait of the postwar profiteering and manipulations of the Hinode Beer Co. shows five decades of festering injustice, evil, and eventually manipulative and ruthless violence.

This book requires slow, persistent reading, as it's not constructed with "thriller" props or passionate emotions. But for those who savor the view of our global perils through the lens of all-too-human history, it's a dark treasure well worth the time for reading.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Mass Killings, Cultural Collapse, or Just Murder ... in CULT X from Fuminori Nakamura

Japanese noir can finger the dark and dangerous side of urban life deftly -- a long-term slide from the twists of culture and despair that William Gibson's Neuromancer laid out for us in (the real) 1984. It's the obverse of the playful simplicity of manga's wide-eyed images. And because Japan's imperial drive toward domination remains bottled up inside today's imposed regimen of gun scarcity and forbidden military action, there's an aspect of sharpening blades for action that can be terrifying.

Fuminori Nakamura (the pen name of a Tokyo author) showed in The Gun his capacity for binding emotions around a small symbol until the pressure to act -- and act violently -- can't be restrained. In his newest novel, CULT X, set for release by Soho Press on May 22, he's chosen to probe an appalling moment of recent Japanese history: the 1995 sarin subway attack in Tokyo. That attack was the second to rip news headlines, preceded by the 1994 sarin poisoning that took place in Matsumoto City, Japan.

As in his earlier work, Nakamura moves toward the criminal actions in increments rooted in damaged lives.  Toru Narazaki can hardly believe it when he learns that the woman who disappeared from his life -- hinting at suicide -- has been seen alive. His desire to rediscover this woman, Ryoko Tachibana, pulls him out of his ordinary life, into exploration of what he thinks at first is a religious retreat group. The sleuth who's informed him that Ryoko is alive gives us a window into Narazaki's soul as he reflects that Narazaki "looked like he'd lost something he needed to go on living. Yet his gaze was terribly powerful, and had a strange radiance."

It's hunger and necessity gleaming at the surface of a life that's been ordinary until now. In fact, when Narazaki first visits the retreat building pointed out to him, and a middle-aged woman's voice inquires who he is, his reply is revelatory:

"My name's Toru Narazaki. I'm ... I'm not really anyone."

Although he's unaware of the force of his desire, Narazaki presses forward, trying to find Ryoko and make sense of her abrupt departure from his life. Long before he locates her, though, he's trapped in the power of his own longing for attention, sex, human contact in the most basic and childlike (although orgasmic) ways. His quest thus originates from almost pure physicality -- the exact opposite of what he'd imagined a religious process would involve.

It's not long before Narazaki realizes there are double undercurrents to what he's experiencing. On one hand, he's welcomed into a cult that's based in both philosophy and modern physics, with an engaging lecturer for its revered leader. And on the other, he's made himself into an ideal victim for the cult's enemies.

Sorting this into waves of external action, the book twists adeptly toward a horror-laden plot of mass destruction. Is Fuminori Nakamura suggesting that Japan's soul is a match to this protagonist's? I dread the notion, as the missing woman finally appears to greet the seeker, and Narazaki is intensely humiliated by the way she finds him:

When reality ultimately punctured one corner of his consciousness, the violence of his desires came rushing out. That's why I came here, Narazaki thought. To make my own real life seem like a fantasy. Out of contempt for my life ... No, contempt for the real world. But Narazaki couldn't say that to Tachibana. [...] Why am I like this? Why is my body like this? Narazaki's eyes began to tear up -- tears no one could sympathize with. Anger rose up to replace his embarrassment -- ugly, inappropriate anger.

Is that why the sarin poisonings took place? Out of an ugly anger rooted in abiding humiliation? In that case, what does the suspense here threaten, for all of us?

CULT X is a dark crime novel, published by Soho Crime (Soho Press). But it's also, like Nakamura's earlier books, a deliberate and painful fingering of old and new wounds. Horrifying, yes -- but worth confronting.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

 

Can a Murder Mystery Be Tender? Yes, with RAINBIRDS by Clarissa Goenawan

Soho Crime has just added to its Japanese mysteries by publishing the debut novel of Clarissa Goenawan, RAINBIRDS. It couldn't be much more different from the work of Fuminori Nakamura, whose spare, literary noir with crime twists (also from Soho Crime) comes with both power and significant darkness -- instead, Goenawan (born in Indonesia, now living in Singapore) has taken the formalized and gender-forced culture of Japan and embedded in it a work of deep tenderness and ardent storytelling.

The young man who narrates RAINBIRDS is named Ren Ishida; he is about to take his graduate degree in English literature when he gets word that his sister Keiko, whom he hasn't seen in years, is a murder victim, stabbed in the street on a rainy night in a small city quite distant from the siblings' original home in Tokyo. Since he's not needed in Tokyo -- his grad work is all done except for the final ceremony -- he races off to the scene of Keiko's death. And, in a quirky follow-up to the mystery of her life of the past few years, he agrees to temporarily take on her duties teaching English at a cram school. Will he discover who his sister was and why she was killed?

Goenawan clearly has written her own English language here -- no translator involved -- but there is a slight stiltedness to the prose that reminds me of well-done translations from the Japanese. I suspect this also reflects a difference in how a Pacific-Rim novel described different levels of thought and action, in contrast to an American or British one. Here's a sample from one of the more moving moments of RAINBIRDS, when Ren leaves his unexpected housing in the middle of the night to experience what his sister might have, at the same time of night, in the park where she was murdered:

I lay down on the ground, panting. The rain hit my face, but I stayed still and closed my eyes. All I could hear was the sound of rain.

My sister should have been able to guess nobody would come in this kind of weather. She would have known she was about to die. What was on her mind in those final minutes?  Had she thought about Mr. Tsuda, or the guy she had gone out with in Akakawa? Had she thought about me?

Since the day my sister had left Tokyo, I'd hoped for her return, but I'd never told her that. Had I been too proud, or too indifferent? If I'd asked her to come back, would she still be alive?

I clenched my fists. No use asking myself that now -- no answer would bring her back. The day my sister died, a part of me died, too.

Ren's continued probing of his sister's murder will give him a fresh view of who she was and what the relationship between the two of them, stranded by their embattled parents, had really, meant. At the same time, he questions his own behaviors -- perhaps very Japanese ones in terms of having sex with prostitutes and casual partners for one-night stands, but also his inability to commit to the woman who wants to marry him.

I would certainly read another book from Goenawan, and wonder whether the Japanese feel of her writing would continue if she places future novels in other locations, or whether it is somehow part of her personal style. Mystery readers who feel strongly about the conventions of the genre may not be happy with the way RAINBIRDS carves out its terrain. But those who already enjoy Asian literature (including work by Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami) and those accustomed to the genre bending that takes place in modern noir work will find themselves unexpectedly at home in this less dark, yet self-inquiring, work. Released today by Soho Crime (Soho Press).

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Japanese Noir, Painted in Precise Detail, from Fuminori Nakamura

The newest "Japanese noir" crime novel to arrive in the US from Fuminori Nakamura, THE BOY IN THE EARTH, begins as a slow, precise meditation by the protagonist (an unnamed Tokyo taxi driver who narrates all of the book), as he releases himself into being beaten and perhaps killed by a gang of motorcycle riders whose antagonism he has deliberately sought. Sentence by sentence, we sink with him into a crystalline awareness of the situation:

If they kept kicking me, if they beat me to a pulp, I might vanish into nothing, I might be absorbed by the earth, deep underground. It was terrifying. I felt robbed of my strength, and my heart raced painfully, although the twitching that ran up and down my spine was not unpleasant. Little by little, this fearful trembling was transforming into something else entirely, like a feeling of anticipation. Despite my terror, there was the definite sensation that I was patiently standing by. I experienced a moment of skepticism, but then it no longer mattered.

These precise details of sensation and taste-tested emotion make up an intricate portrait in motion, perhaps a dance -- each movement wrapped in hesitation and conflicted emotion and thought.

Our narrator, we soon realize, is an orphan -- or at least grew up in an orphanage, but also had devastating experiences in foster care. As if we were inside the core of a sociopath, a character on "Criminal Minds," an unfathomable criminal from yesterday's newspaper, we share the shiver of both disgust and realization.

So it is that this very short novel -- 147 pages as translated by Allison Markin Powell and published by Soho Crime -- blossoms in parallel to one of Nakamura's earlier meditations on crime, The Gun. Nakamura presents the small sharp fragments of injury that lead to a mind or soul ready to perform extreme acts. What THE BOY IN THE EARTH offers that differentiates it, though, is the delicate and repeated experience of holding back from action -- what the 12-stepper recognizes perhaps as "looking through the glass" to experience a moment of the future before taking a step in the present.

I found myself caught up in the dance of language and the intimate actions of the book. Dark, yes, and twisted, and deeply sad -- but it's also a book I'd recommend to adventurous readers who appreciate art and insight. There's nothing ordinary about it at all. And that, in the long run, becomes a remarkable experience in crime fiction.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Empowering the Crime Fiction Genre: Fuminori Nakamura #10

A reviewer in one of this morning's powerful newspapers made the casual assumption that thrillers, a plot-driven subgenre of the mystery field, are written (like other mysteries) to provide escape time for readers. With Fuminori Nakamura's newest crime novel in mind, THE KINGDOM, that's simply not the case.

Instead, consider Dostoevsky's powerful novel The Brothers Karamazov  -- which could be described as driven by a plot involving patricide, the world-shaking killing of father by child. Amid all the twists of the book, the author's philosophizing (spoken by the characters) pounds against the soul like an ocean on a beach. Well, pardon the dramatic metaphor, but over and over, in THE KINGDOM, I thought of Dostoevsky.

The book's first-person narrative comes from Yurika, a professional prostitute in Tokyo's underworld (a career choice that won't surprise readers of Nakamura's earlier books). Not only is she soliciting men to have sex with her -- she's working for a mysterious organization that pays her to drug them men, set up items around their naked bodies (sometimes she is one of the items), and photograph them, obviously for the sake of power via blackmail. Yurika (dare we guess that the sound of her name, spoken aloud, is signaling something?) gets off on the vulnerability she creates through these stagings. But she's not clear on who actually is hiring her, to the point where she may even have created one or more stagings in opposition to her real bosses. Uh-oh.

When her own past suddenly takes center stage, she's trapped and frantic. And despite her logical reaction of terror and desire to escape, she's pinned ... and listening, against her will, to a very disturbing man she calls (whether it's his real name or not) Kizaki:

Kizaki moved his hand slightly.

"Let's say there is a man on the bed in a love hotel in Ikebukuro, and you stab him straight through the chest."

I focused on my nerves and maintained my smile. I'm sure he was saying on it purpose, but he didn't show it at all.

"Just staring cruelly at that man as he suffers from the wound is boring. Smiling while you watch him suffer, that's boring, too. You must feel what he feels. ... keep stabbing. Deeper. Deeper. Then, both the overwhelming, cruel joy of destroying a life and the warm feeling of sympathizing with that life will seep through you. ... those feelings will go beyond human capacity, and keep rising up forever. Like a whirlpool. What's important is to leave nothing unappreciated. It's great. That moment."

Kizaki reached out and suddenly grabbed the neck of the woman next to him.

The meshing of violence, sex, and an insistent pornographic attention to inner feelings places THE KINGDOM in a stance that may explain, for instance, the steady TV contracts to shows like Criminal Minds and books like The Silence of the Lambs. This is the inside-out of crime fiction: not the heroic stance of the crime solver, but the obsessive drive of the most twisted and potent of criminals, and the desire to watch.

And yet. Yurika is more than her paid work, and more than her trembling, half-exhilarated shock at what confronts her. Emerging from her isolation as a child orphan and then as an adult working in the most despised ways, she expresses a longing for something "other." She asks of herself, "What tide was I being tossed around by? Who or what had I betrayed? What had I escaped from?"

In this tenth of his crime novels, Nakamura presses more directly than ever on the dark side of urban lives, from Tokyo to its shadowed mirror in urban America. Wisely, he keeps the plot direct, clear, and compact -- THE KINGDOM wraps up at 212 pages -- and provides a classic in the making.

Obviously, if the violence and darkness repel you, don't read this one. But if you can bear walking through the book as a "watcher" of what Nakamura presents, then this book is well worth reading and owning. I'll be re-reading this and other Nakamura crime novels, for sure. Once again, Soho Crime proves that the "mystery genre" is far wider and more diverse than any casual assumptions might suggest.

Just make sure there's room in your schedule for recovery from this highly purposeful journey into darkness.

THE MASK, Taylor Stevens (Vanessa Michael Munroe #6)

There are some mystery authors -- maybe a dozen, maybe a few more than that -- whose books I follow from one release to the next, making sure I get a copy of each new title when it's published. But because I am 95 percent sure I'll enjoy those books (and also that the authors don't "need" my attention at the time of release ... they are already pretty well know), I don't race to open the covers. I wait until I can enjoy them at their own best pace.

So last week I indulged in reading THE MASK, which is the sixth book featuring Vanessa Michael Munroe. Call her Munroe, secret agent style ... or call her Michael, which is what her long-term lover Miles Bradford knows she calls herself. Slight of build, able to adeptly disguise herself as a young man as needed, Michael is also a very dangerous killer when in jeopardy.

Her reunion with Miles at the start of this book marks the end of a long period of recovery for Munroe. Her teammates in a private company based in the United States valued her for her multiple languages and her ability to unravel codes and intrigues of astounding complexity. But her path's been dangerous not just to herself but also to her friends. It's been a long time since she dared to be geographically close to even Miles Bradford, even though she has longed for the comfort of being with the one person who's ever really accepted her in all her emotionally scarred integrity.

Stevens, diverging in rare one-sentence hints from Munroe's viewpoint, hints to readers that the tender and amazing reunion of the lovers, in Japan of all places, isn't the honest coupling it appears. Munroe's tendency to blame herself for the hint of awkwardness, and for the puzzle of Miles not inviting her into his work in a Japanese biotech company, distorts her vision for long enough to ramp up the danger and risk involved. In perhaps the book's most bizarre yet also insightful twist, when Munroe has to turn professional to help Miles, she insists on being paid Big Bucks by their security company -- something the company leader back in the States finds despicable. Still, for the person Munroe is, and for the highly unlikely face that she can indeed love Miles, it's a necessary transformation of the emotional ground -- taking her out of the shoes of a woman desperate to save her beloved, and giving her instead the equivalent of steel-toed boots and a highly technical construction to pull together.

If you appreciate the powerful darkness of Karen Slaughter's crime fiction, this is for you; it's also the closest there is to a woman's version of Jack Reacher from Lee Child's books, although Munroe is more self-aware and gives herself a different skill set. But that pressure to set things right, and to undo injustice, is spot on target.

Curious about the title? No, it's not a reference to kinky sex, but rather to the way some people choose to protect their vulnerabilities -- and also, I think, to the willingness of many a Westerner to continue to buy the myth of the inscrutable Asian face. By the end of THE MASK, I also knew a bit more about myself. Which, come to think of it, may be the highest achievement for any book worth reading.

If you're new to Taylor Stevens, take a few minutes to explore her author website before you dip into the books. Yes, I think there's more depth in this book if you've read the other five, but you don't have to. On the other hand, after you read THE MASK, you may decide, as I have, that you want them all.

Dark, Compelling, Insistent: THE GUN, Fuminori Nakamura

When a culture completely bans private possession of an item, does its value rise? Does its presence generate a fascination that will lead to obsession and deadly results?

On the surface, the intense and unavoidable map of Fuminori Nakamura's college-student protagonist in THE GUN says exactly that. In the midst of an unremarkable and boring life, where classes are easy to sleep through or avoid and the biggest challenge is getting laid with new women on a regular basis, this student, Nishikawa, suffers the accident of finding a gun next to a dead man under a bridge. When he yields to impulse and seizes the weapon for himself, in Japan's gun-empty climate, he moves from ordinary to extraordinary in one swift choice.

From here, the movement of the plot zigzags between suspense -- how will the student keep his discovery private, how will it overtake his mind, who may intrude on his private world and challenge his possession -- and inevitability: when will he yield also to the gun's own design and purpose and choose to fire it, and at what? Where? Why?

It sounds almost simple as a premise. But the steady pounding of the existential narrative acquires, in Nakamura's hands, a frightening force. At the same time, the gun itself becomes a love interest, far more possessive than the women weeping and having hook-up sex with the young man.

This is actually Nakamura's prize-winning debut novel, although Soho Crime released three of his others in earlier translations: The Thief, Last Winter We Parted, and Evil and the Mask. It's not clear why this one was delayed. But it has the force of many a debut novel, where the press of a contract hasn't yet forced the author to hurry -- each phrase, each scene cuts a precise step toward the book's conclusion.

Beyond the premise of a machine that begs for being used as designed is another layer of cultural critique, as the author makes it clear that Nishikawa associates the gun with America: a place where life involves more surprise and variety, at least on the surface, than in Japan. Tickling at the edge of this awareness is a lecture given by his professor:

"What is so powerful about American culture" -- he got this far and then sneezed once, loudly -- "however, is America's diversity itself. The Americanization of Japan is nothing new, but I would hate to think that it demonstrates a scarcity of Japanese culture. Yet the longing for American culture has existed since our defeat in the war up through the present day . . ."

Nishikawa's only half listening to the professor -- his thoughts are already wound around his secret possession. "I led a boring life. It stood to reason that the gun would act as a stimulant within such tedium. ... I could think only of it causing injury, of destroying life; it had been created expressly so that a person could commit such deeds."

The gun becomes a symbol for more than cruelty, more than precise intent: It carries away the possibility of sane and loving life in community.

I live in a gun-welcoming culture, in rural Vermont, where a gun is hardly more lethal, and no more focused on cruelty, than a pipe wrench. (You probably don't want the gruesome details of what happened near here with a pipe wrench a couple of years ago.) It's more complicated than that here, though -- you can't access a "long gun" (at least, for legal use) until you acquire a certain age or standing (such as taking a hunter safety class, in order to get your deer hunting license), and for many youngsters, receiving a gun of their own is as potent a sign of "adulthood" as a first beer or a car.

And I don't for a moment believe that the device itself turns someone into a killer. Nor do I think Nakamura is proposing that ... although the steady poisoning of his student's mind is fully believable.

But I do think the role of firearms is one of the crucial results of the difference between Japan's island-based culture and the American "Manifest Destiny" and wildlands. A small personal story here: A couple of decades ago, my teenaged sons and I enjoyed our first Japanese student guests in our home. I think it was the second one who, upon arrival, looked around the cozy country kitchen with fear and asked, "Where are the guns?" When we said we didn't have any, he asked, with even more fear, "Will there be guns at school on Monday?" Looking back, our quick response of "No, of course not!" was naive and innocent -- the dailiness of gun killings in 2015 has been one of the most terrible shocks of the year. We could have seen it coming.

No, THE GUN isn't a cultural critique. It's a short, intense work of suspense and increasing madness, really. It moves with long paragraphs, little dialogue, a constant first-person view without much inner forethought, and with a rising tide of horror. Framing it around "the student" places it parallel to The Little Prince and several works of French and German philosophy-in-fiction. It's a good read (if you can handle "noir").

But it's also more than that. I tip my hat to Soho Crime for providing it (release date is January 5). And of course to the author.

THE GUN is a book I'll never forget. What I'll do with that, I'm not quite sure. Yet.

With Secrets and Revelation: DREAMING SPIES, Laurie R. King

If you're a Laurie R. King fan -- and I am -- you probably had DREAMING SPIES on your list earlier this year, and purchased it soon after its release in mid February. I did, too, but I knew there was no rush to review it, so I tucked it away to enjoy later.

So, a few reasons to read (and collect) this 13th "novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes":

* For anyone who's followed Laurie R. King's writing, from the Kate Martinelli (San Francisco) homicide series to the eerie and compelling Stuyvesant & Grey books to the very popular Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes sequence, reading DREAMING SPIES is the best way to discover which direction King's creativity has taken this time, and how she's tying together her many interests. Plus, is her storytelling changing with time? My own answer to this: Yes, she's separating the thread of violent crime from the thread of puzzle solving. Although her 2006 release, The Art of Detection, was a deliberate (and entertaining) effort to tie the Martinelli series to the Russell/Holmes books, it left out some of the dark threat of the early Martinelli books. That darkness now prowls in the Stuyvesant & Gray books instead (so far, just two of them: Touchstone in 2007 and The Bones of Paris in 2013).

* Holmes fans who are not deadly serious in their passions can enjoy the notion of Holmes as a much older man, married to his young student Mary Russell -- and in DREAMING SPIES, Russell asserts her equality to Holmes in terms of deftness with disguise, quick planning, even martial arts. In fact, the premise of the story, which takes the pair into Japan in 1924 to assist a ninja (or more than one ninja!) and other politically significant Japanese figures, is that neither Russell nor Holmes speaks Japanese or has expertise in the "customs of the country." Hence their decision to explore, and then assist, puts them on a level playing field. Actually that means Russell will dominate a bit more than usual, since she's younger and by gender better adapted to the schemes involved this time.

*King is such a good storyteller that this, like her earlier books, is an entertaining diversion with page-turner appeal. She's also a top-notch researcher, so don't let the unexpected appearance of, say, a woman who is a ninja turn up any doubts: Sure enough, there's history to back the concept, with an early Japanese woman becoming an espionage-oriented ninja in the 16th century, running her own network. Russell is a bit too much of a loner to adapt to a network, but she's not going to let a spy who's younger than herself take over the scene! (Or is she?)

*If you've been reading any of the half dozen intriguing series of English mysteries racing into print on the World War I years and the years between the wars -- or even James Benn's World War II series with Billy Boyle -- this 1924/1925 setup will enhance what you're already consuming, adding details of Europe, the United States, and Asia, particularly Japan. It's a time-honored way to enjoy adding history to your plate.

These Russell/Holmes books don't feel like the original Sherlock Holmes tales -- they leave a very different taste in the mind -- and that's the drawback to reading them. The depressed genius of the Conan Doyle character wouldn't balance all that well with Russell's animation and enthusiasms, I think. So, as with the earlier books in the series, enter lightly, for the fun of it. (My one regret for DREAMING SPIES was the near-absence of Holmes's usual remarkable insights ... and with it, I thought, a bit less insight on Russell's part, too. But perhaps they were both overwhelmed with learning that new language, and all that comes with it.)

Best of all, I came away from the book relaxed, taking joy in the twists and resolution of the story, and more attentive to the history and cultures on display. Fun! I recommend reading it -- provided the "reasons" above fit your state of mind as you open the book.