Opening with a beautifully paced night time scene in which a father breaks into his own apartment to abduct his children, AZABU GETAWAY is a thoroughly absorbing literary thriller. Detective Hiroshi is investigating a murder of a top finance executive when he is tasked with looking into the abduction. This sets in motion a chain of events propelling Hiroshi into the shadowy corners of Tokyo’s business world and uncovering high crimes and corruption as the trail leads to the heart of darkness amongst offshore tax havens and amoral money men. This is the fifth book in Michael Pronko’s Hiroshi series and regular readers will be instantly at home in the detective’s noirish world. Like the very best of long-running sagas AZABU GETAWAY builds on what came before but expands and elaborates on its lead character. Notable here is the introduction of a combative new member of the investigating team giving Hiroshi a foil and ramping up the drama.

A Tokyo resident for more than twenty years, working as a professor of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University, Pronko is excellent at revealing the city and its culture with subtle insight rather than broad strokes. Indeed, there is a sophistication to his prose that is all too infrequent in contemporary crime thrillers. Little details like the cops at a crime scene bickering over the available sizes of body bags add nuanced layers to characters that in less capable hands could appear rote or clichéd. The machinations of high finance and institutional corruption are revealed with clarity and precision, always entirely convincing, never over complicated. As Hiroshi’s boss said in an earlier novel, murder is always connected to money and the detective’s crime solving is a perfect balance between his forensic accounting skills and more traditional homicide investigation.

AZABU GETAWAY works as a stand-alone introduction to Detective Hiroshi but new readers will undoubtedly be drawn to the earlier novels in the series as Michael Pronko’s storytelling is gripping with a prose style that is lyrical and intelligent. A very high quality literary thriller.

~Kent Lane for IndieReader