Tokyo Traffic (Detective Hiroshi, Book 3) by Michael Pronko
Release date: June 20, 2020
Subgenre: International mystery, Japanese mystery
About Tokyo Traffic:
Running from a life she didn't choose, in a city she doesn't know
Sukanya,
a young Thai girl, loses herself in the vastness of Tokyo. With her
Bangkok street smarts, and some stolen money, she stays ahead of her
former captors who will do anything to recover the computer she took.
After befriending Chiho, a Japanese girl living in an internet café,
Sukanya makes plans to rid herself of her pursuers, and her past,
forever.
In Tokyo, street smarts aren't always enough
Meanwhile, Detective Hiroshi Shimizu leaves the safe confines of his office to investigate a porn studio where a brutal triple murder took place. The studio's accounts point him in multiple directions at once. Together with ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi and old-school Takamatsu, Hiroshi tracks the killers through Tokyo's music clubs and teen hangouts, bayside docks and byways, straight into the underbelly of the global economy.
As bodies wash up from Tokyo Bay, Hiroshi tries to find the Thai girl at the center of it all, whose name he doesn't even know. He uncovers a human trafficking ring and cryptocurrency scammers whose connections extend to the highest levels of Tokyo's power elite.
TOKYO TRAFFIC is the third in the Tokyo-based Detective Hiroshi series by award-winning author Michael Pronko.
In Tokyo, street smarts aren't always enough
Meanwhile, Detective Hiroshi Shimizu leaves the safe confines of his office to investigate a porn studio where a brutal triple murder took place. The studio's accounts point him in multiple directions at once. Together with ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi and old-school Takamatsu, Hiroshi tracks the killers through Tokyo's music clubs and teen hangouts, bayside docks and byways, straight into the underbelly of the global economy.
As bodies wash up from Tokyo Bay, Hiroshi tries to find the Thai girl at the center of it all, whose name he doesn't even know. He uncovers a human trafficking ring and cryptocurrency scammers whose connections extend to the highest levels of Tokyo's power elite.
TOKYO TRAFFIC is the third in the Tokyo-based Detective Hiroshi series by award-winning author Michael Pronko.
Excerpt:
Crouching behind the
plywood wall of the film set, Sukanya waited until silence echoed through the
cavernous warehouse. Her skin was clammy and covered in goosebumps. Sweat
sprang from every pore in her body. She hugged herself, shivering, listening,
her heart pumping hard from the last injection of whatever it was.
When the silence and
the cold became too much, she peered around the edge of the film set, shading
her eyes from the white blaze of an upended light, and stepped out to survey the
scene. Cold air floated down from the high, dark ceiling. Shadows loomed over
the muted chaos below.
Chairs, tables, and
cameras were strewn across the concrete floor. The legs of tripods, toppled in
the struggle, poked up like spikes. The wall of the set was bashed and
splintered.
Umbrella lights and
soft boxes, open-faced halogens and LEDs threw light in crossed directions. One
of the knocked-over key lights sizzled and popped, darkening a swath of the
set. Another light winked off without a sound, deepening the dim expanse of the
warehouse.
From the top of the
sets to the high ceiling, the air barely moved. There was no longer anything to
hide from.
Sukanya walked
forward, careful of the broken glass strewn in front of the mock living room.
The lingering smell was the usual—airless, sweaty, and coarse—though mixed with
something different. From small, dark pools across the smooth concrete floor
rose a metallic scent she remembered from the back of street stalls in
Bangkok’s markets.
She forced herself to
look at the bodies. Her insides jumped, but her legs stayed rooted in place.
She stood there wishing she could take off and soar away, wishing she could
scream.
She slipped her bare
feet into a pair of plastic sandals at the edge of the set floor. They were a
men’s size, but she clenched her toes and shuffled them against the concrete,
testing the traction. She could run in them.
From a gym bag on a
bench beside the set wall, she dug out a towel. It smelled clean, so she wiped
herself dry. She dug inside the bag and found a pair of running shorts, sizes
too big, but she pulled them on and yanked the string tight around her thin
waist. Her shoulders filled out a large blue soccer jersey that hung down to
her thighs. She packed her long hair into a tight ponytail with a wristband.
They weren’t after
her yet, but they would be soon. With her wrong-sized clothes and Thai
features, her awkward foreignness, and not knowing where to go, they would find
her even in the vast unknown of Tokyo.
Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Apple | Smashwords
About Michael Pronko:
Michael Pronko is a Tokyo-based
writer of murder, memoir and music. His writing about Tokyo life and his
character-driven mysteries have won awards and five-star reviews. Kirkus Reviews selected his second
novel, The Moving Blade for their
Best Books of 2018. The Last Train
won the Shelf
Unbound Competition for Best Independently Published Book.
Michael also runs the website, Jazz in Japan, which covers the vibrant
jazz scene in Tokyo and Yokohama. During his 20 years in Japan, he has written
about Japanese culture, art, society and politics for Newsweek Japan, The
Japan Times, and Artscape Japan. He has read his essays on NHK TV
and done programs for Nippon Television based on his writings.
A philosophy major, Michael
traveled for years, ducking in and out of graduate schools, before finishing
his PhD on Charles Dickens and film. He finally settled in Tokyo as a professor
of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University. His seminars focus on contemporary novels, short stories and film
adaptations.
Comments
Post a Comment