JAPANTOWN

This debut thriller stars Jim Brodie, an American antique dealer-turned-P.I., whose deep knowledge of Japanese culture gets him involved with a formidable enemy halfway around the world—an enemy who is using his young daughter to lure him into battle.

It’s been nine months since Jim Brodie recovered a Japanese national treasure, making him something of a local hero in Tokyo. Now, the street-wise, fiercely independent entrepreneur is back home in San Francisco, struggling to squeeze next month’s rent from his fledgling antique shop while juggling the demands of his six-year-old daughter Jenny and the detective/security agency in the Japanese capital he inherited from his American father, a former army MP. Late one night while he's restoring a valuable Japanese artifact, Brodie receives a call from Frank Renna, a friend and lieutenant in SFPD’s homicide division. A whole family has been senselessly gunned down in San Francisco’s Japantown. There are no witnesses, but among the bodies is a scrap of paper with an indecipherable Japanese character on it. An American born in Japan, fluent in the language, and with extensive contacts in the Asian community, Brodie has advised SFPD in the past, but he's never been called to a murder scene. When he arrives, he's shocked to find that the only clue appears to be the same Japanese character that was graffiti'ed on the street corner outside of the house where his wife Meiko, Jenny's mother, was killed in a fire three years earlier. With the assistance of a shadow powerbroker, a renegade Japanese detective, and the elusive telecommunications tycoon at the center of the Japantown murders, Brodie moves from the kill zone in San Francisco to terrorized citizens and murdered informants in Tokyo, and then to a remote Japanese village where an enemy unlike any other has been operating unchecked for hundreds of years. He soon finds himself living a nightmare, at the center of a deadly secret that not only threatens to take his life but, in the traditional Japanese manner of old, to eliminate all close family and friends— including his daughter. Barry Lancet has lived in Tokyo for over two decades. He spent 25 years working for one of the country’s largest publishers, developing books on a wide range of Japanese subjects, gaining access to inner circles in culture, business, and traditional fields most outsiders never see. Early in his tenure in the Japanese capital, he was hauled in by the police for a non-criminal infraction and interrogated for three hours, one of the most intense psychological encounters he had faced in Japan to that point. The run-in fascinated him and sparked the idea for a thriller based on his growing number of unusual experiences in Japan.