Pacific Burn

Pacific Burn, A Jim Brodie Thriller, by Barry Lancet, Simon and Schuster 2017

If you enjoyed Lancet's preceding best-sellers -- Japantown and Tokyo Kill, you've love following part-time detective full-time art and antiques expert Jim Brodie through San Francisco and his latest challenge.  Although the writing is great, and the scenery well-described, the sadness of the murders he describes are a little too real to dismiss.  

In this latest offering Brodie, hired on as the liaison for the mayor's new Pacific Rim Friendship Program, barely escapes a roof-top sniper, while his long-time friend Japanese artist Ken Nobuki, is hit and hospitalized in a coma.  Just a week earlier Nobuki's son is found cold and bloodied, draped over a marble sculpture.  Thrown back into his detective world, Brodie finds himself following leads in Washington, DC, where he confronts the DHS, the CIA and the FBI.  From there he crosses the Pacific, and in Tokyo he begins to see an image of a very deadly and ruthless killer that is focusing on the Nobuki family. 

Can this art and antiques dealer safely navigate an international investigation?  At the conclusion of the book's eighty chapters, plus epilogue - the chapters are unnervingly short - readers will be shocked because Brodie discovers, as do the rest of us when we listen carefully, that people with bad intent often tell us, sometimes with smokey signals, what their intentions are.  And when they follow through, why should we be shocked?

Japan art and culture fans will appreciate Lancet's closing section entitled "Authenticity," which presents more background data on the colorful art pieces and venues mentioned in this latest Brodie thriller.