Amazon.com Review
One of the reasons we read foreign mysteries (no matter where we live) is because they let us weave our way quickly into the cultures of other countries, using crime as the common thread. Akimitsu Takagi's books are uniquely Japanese: they are slightly stiff and formal at first, apparently treating bloody subjects in a calm and formal manner; only later do we realize how deeply we've become involved.
Takagi, born in 1920, wrote his first mystery at the age of 28. He quickly became Japan's most famous mystery writer--a self-taught legal expert whose heroes in the dozens of books he produced until his death in 1995 were usually prosecutors or police investigators. But in this story (part of the publisher's ambitious plan to introduce Takagi's books to a worldwide audience), the focus is on a young stock broker named Shigeo Segawa, trained at a giant brokerage house whose motto was "Money Is Everything." As Takagi tells us, "the pleasure of having money, the admiration for it, the longing for it, and the misery without it--these emotions had eaten their way into Segawa's bones long ago."
Crushed and made desperate by a stock market crash in the 1960s, Segawa gets involved in a shady industrial espionage scheme, and twice betrays one of his oldest friends--by seducing his wife and trying to steal the formula for a new chemical process. When his friend is murdered, Segawa becomes the logical suspect. But a sharp young prosecutor named Kirishima begins to think that perhaps the blame lies elsewhere--with the informer who told the dead friend what Segawa had done. Other Takagi classics available in paperback: Honeymoon to Nowhere and The Tattoo Murder Case. --Dick Adler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
There are many webs and one or more deadly spiders spinning them in this intricate tale of deceit and murder from the late Japanese master (1920-1995); the book is one of two by Takagi that Soho will publish in June (see review below). Shiego Segawa should have listened to the old adage, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." The young stock-market trader has been enjoying all the benefits of Japan's burgeoning postwar resurgence until he overreaches and is caught short when the market tumbles. Allowed to resign from his company, he starts his own, only to see it fail. Then he is offered a wonderful job opportunity: Mikio Sakai, the owner of a small new firm, Shinwa Trading Co., asks him to come on as salesman, for a high salary and higher prospects. But Sakai's real aim is industrial sabotage, and Shiego soon finds himself on a slippery slope where he must juggle women and ethics while betraying an old friend. When Shoichi Ogino, his putative target, discovers the betrayal and then is murdered, Shiego is the obvious suspect. But State Prosecutor Saburo Kirishima is never satisfied by the obvious, and his deft probing gradually strips away the cobwebs to reveal an elegant solution.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
