Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Nicolás Obregón

Inspector Kosuke Iwata, formerly of the Tokyo Police Department, is now a private investigator in Los Angeles.  After solving two high profile cases in Japan’s capital, Iwata decides to leave his life there and move to California and start a new career as a private investigator.  But there’s more to his decision than the one he publicly admits to, that of a desire to flee fame.  As Sins as Scarlet progresses, bits and pieces emerge that tell his story.

The book’s title comes from Isaiah 1:18:  “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”  Certainly the sins in this novel are multiple and scarlet; the question is, can they ever be made as white as snow?

As a young child, Iwata was abandoned by his mother, Nozomi, and placed in an orphanage in Japan.  Although he received letters from her occasionally that promised she would come for him, he never believed it would happen; thus he was stunned when after a decade she appeared with her American husband and the three flew to California.  Nozomi never explained to her son why she had left Japan or why she returned to get him after so many years.  Now Iwata and his widowed mother are both living in Los Angeles, although separately, with this still-unresolved issue continuing to create tension between them.

After spending years in California, Iwata returned to Japan with his American wife, Cleo; the pair later became parents.  References are made throughout the novel to Cleo and their young daughter, but what happened to them and why they are not a part of Iwata’s current life remain a mystery until almost the book’s end.

On what starts out as an ordinary morning of seeing prospective clients, Iwata is stunned when Charlotte Nichol, Cleo’s mother, walks into his office.  So angry at him that she can hardly contain herself, she has seemingly forced herself to come to him for help.

She tells him that her other child, Julian, has been murdered and that the police are doing nothing to solve the crime.  Iwata knows that Julian transitioned gender years earlier and had become Meredith. Obviously this is something that Charlotte has not completely accepted, as evidenced by her using both names to refer to her child; she has come to Iwata as a last resort, only after deciding that the police have no interest in solving the crime.

“I’ve come here because Meredith was murdered and you’re going to do your work for me….You owe me that much for Cleo,” she declares.

As the definition of noir is crime fiction featuring hard-boiled cynical characters and bleak sleazy settings, this is the “most noirish” mystery I have recently read.  There is so much unhappiness, despair, and criminality in this book that it almost makes the reader give up on the human race.  But then there’s Kosuke Iwata, a man shouldering his own heavy burden, who refuses to look away from the crimes and criminals that surround him in order to keep his promise to Charlotte.

Sins as Scarlet is the second novel by Nicolás Obregón I have reviewed, Blue Light Yokohama being the first.  This book reinforces my belief that he is a gifted writer, one who takes the reader to the darkest places but then leaves that reader with at least a small glimmer of light at the end.

You can read more about Nicolás Obregón at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Hideo Akashi was the most successful homicide detective in Tokyo, well-known for his ability to solve crimes that had other policemen stymied.  So what would have made him jump off the Rainbow Bridge to his death?

Inspector Kosuke Iwata, the protagonist of Blue Light Yokohama, is called in to the busy Tokyo police station to replace Hideo.  At first Senior Inspector Shindo appears reluctant to add Kosuke to his force, wondering aloud if his previous experience in a small district far from the capital, plus his leave of absence from the police for unspecified reasons for more than a year, make him the right choice to fill the famed detective’s shoes.  But manpower is low, Kosuke has the necessary qualifications, at least on paper, so his transfer to the Tokyo Homicide Squad is approved.

Kosuke is partnered with a young woman just transferred from the Missing Persons Bureau, Noriko Sakai, and the two are immediately assigned a case of multiple murder.  The four members of the Kaneshiro family were murdered in their home, their throats slit; even more disturbing, the father’s heart is cut from his body and taken away.  And a strange symbol appears on the master bedroom’s ceiling, that of a black sun.

There’s an immediate lead to a man with several arrests for sexual harassment, a man who was a coworker of Mrs. Kaneshiro.  Masaharu Ezawa takes one look at the two policemen who have come to question him and takes off, throwing a rock behind him that hits Kosuke in the face.  Kosuke runs after Masaharu, stops him with a body tackle, and the two detectives and the suspect head to the precinct.

Masaharu admits to a sexual obsession with Mrs. Kaneshiro, but Kosuke doubts he’s the murderer for whom the police are searching.  However, his superiors seem satisfied that the criminal has been caught, not believing, as Kosuke does, that this is a ritual killing, something that would require a different kind of man from Masaharu Ezawa.  After all, Kosuke reasons, this killer murdered four people without leaving a single fingerprint or clue, something he’s certain would have been impossible for Ezawa.

The police are more concerned with the murder of Mina Fong, a famous screen star, and are looking to complete the investigation of the Kaneshiro murders as quickly as possible.  Kosuke, however, is convinced that the family’s murders have a deeper, more obscure motive than simply the brutal crime it appears to be.  He underscores to Shindo the things that don’t fit:  a black sun sketched on a bedroom ceiling, turkey blood smeared on one of the bodies, incense in each body’s lungs discovered during the autopsy.  Reluctantly, Shindo agrees to give Kosuke one more day to investigate.

Blue Light Yokohama is a novel covering decades.  It opens with with a knife attack on a cable car, delves into Kosuke’s abandonment by his mother and his childhood in a Catholic orphanage, and follows him to his visit with his wife, a patient in a mental hospital.

Nicolás Obregón’s debut mystery is a strongly compelling story about the many layers of life in Tokyo, a deep look into the Japanese psyche.  Whenever the seamy top layer is exposed, another, equally dirty, lies beneath it.

You can read more about Nicolás Obregón at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.