The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda, translated by Giles Murray (Minotaur Books)

Reiko Himekawa is tall, beautiful, and ambitious. Not yet thirty, she’s already made her way up through the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to the rank of lieutenant and leader of a homicide squad. She’s famous--and in some quarters infamous--for the preternatural knowledge she can garner from a murder victim which has propelled her rapid ascent through the ranks. Men in equivalent positions find her talent a direct challenge to their own methodical case work. Reiko’s intuition seems to them like a kind of parlor trick--but her flashes of insight prove essential to solving cases. Many resent her but they grudgingly admit that this new addition to the homicide department is pulling her own weight.

When a body wrapped in a blue tarp is found carelessly discarded in a residential neighborhood, the police are puzzled. Why was the corpse dumped in a spot where it would quickly be discovered and why does it have a long cut in its abdomen that was inflicted post-mortem? Reiko comes up with a plausible theory and begins the investigation, one leading to a horrendous online group that pays to watch a killer who is an artist of murder.

Reiko has a weakness; she makes certain that she’s off the street by nightfall, particularly in the summer. An older squad leader discovers the reason why and uses this to taunt her, hoping to break her nerve and diminish her success. Instead he forces Reiko to face her memories and conquer her fear, as the two of them vie to discover the grisly game and its star performer.

This novel opens with a chapter that may deter squeamish readers but none of the later scenes match it for brutality and horror. Unlike novels by other Japanese crime writers (Natsuo Kirino immediately comes to mind), Tetsuya Honda is more focused on detection than he is on blood and guts. Even the culminating scene when the killer and her director almost come up with another corpse is less revolting than the sights and smells that dominate the book’s first pages.

A cast of characters is listed before the story begins but this is insufficient. It gives the names of only the fourteen police who figure prominently in the novel. A host of victims and the people who knew them offers sixteen additional names to keep straight--making a list for quick reference is highly recommended.

Reiko, with her “all-too-perfect looks” and her fear of “hot summer nights,” is the sort of detective that series are made of and this is only the first of several novels in which she appears. Her rival and tormentor, Lieutenant Katsumata, is equally compelling and his understanding of Reiko’s psychology provides a scene that upstages even the bloody solution to the crime spree. With luck, he’ll be a figure in the series because he’s a much more interesting figure than the two police officers who lust after Reiko, (each in different ways).

An unexpected strength in The Silent Dead is its close attention to details that are especially helpful to readers who don’t know Tokyo or the intricacies of its police hierarchy. Tokyo neighborhoods are crisply and vividly described, to the point that, for the first time ever, I’d like to explore this city. Full points go to Giles Murray, the book’s translator, a man who lives in Tokyo and who is able to escape the stilted dialogue that pervades many English versions of Japanese novels. From the first sentence of this thriller, “A putrid rain was falling, turning the whole world gray,” to its last scene when Kumata pinpoints the startling reason for Reiko’s success, Murray’s translation comes alive for western readers while always maintaining a strong sense of a distant and unfamiliar culture. 

Both Honda and Murray have introduced a detective to watch out for and Reiko Himekawa thoroughly deserves her own television series. Japan gave her one. Are you listening, HBO?~Janet Brown