The Last Train

Detective Hiroshi Shimizu investigates white collar crime in Tokyo. He's lost his girlfriend and still dreams of his time studying in America, but with a stable job, his own office and a half-empty apartment, he's settled in.

When an American businessman turns up dead, his mentor Takamatsu calls him out to the site of a grisly murder. A glimpse from a security camera video suggests the killer was a woman, but in Japan, that seems unlikely. Hiroshi quickly learns how close homicide and suicide can appear in a city full of high-speed trains just a step--or a push--away.

After years in America and lost in neat, clean spreadsheets, can Hiroshi handle the bleak, stark realities of the biggest city in the world? Takamatsu drags Hiroshi out to the hostess clubs and skyscraper offices of Tokyo in search of the killer. To find her, Hiroshi goes deeper and deeper into Tokyo's intricate, gritty and menacing world of buying and selling the most expensive land in the world.

When Takamatsu inexplicably disappears, Hiroshi teams up with ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi. They scour Tokyo's sacred temples, corporate offices and industrial wastelands to find out where Takamatsu went and why an average-seeming woman would be driven to murder.

In the huge, complex and rigid hierarchies of Japan, inside information about real estate can travel in a flash from the top investment firms to the bottom of the working world, where street-level punks and teenage hostesses sell their souls for a small cut of lucrative land deals.

Hiroshi catches traces of the suspect, but in a megalopolis of 40 million people, finding one woman is nearly impossible. If he can't find her, more businessmen will die, she'll flee the country and the cutthroat world of buying and selling property will never change when stakes are high.

Hiroshi's determined to cut through Japan's ambiguities--and dangers--to find the murdering ex-hostess before she extracts her final revenge--which just might be him.