by (W) Richard Jerram
A pitch-black, Dexter-like thriller from the winner of the 2024 Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger, in which a Tokyo paparazzo commits murders in order to generate the photos his magazine’s readership ghoulishly demands. A razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies and obsession with true crime for fans of Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer, and hit HBO crime drama Tokyo Vice.A pitch-black, Dexter-like thriller from the winner of the 2024 Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger, in which a Tokyo paparazzo commits murders in order to generate the photos his magazine’s readership ghoulishly demands. A razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies and obsession with true crime for fans of Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer.Ken Kato is a half-British, half-Japanese photojournalist working for a low-brow weekly magazine in Tokyo. He achieved fame with a photograph of a boy who drowned in the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, who he could have saved had he not been more concerned with finding the right light and composition for his shot.Four years later, he has failed to repeat that success and, facing irrelevancy (and, worse, redundancy), he decides to turn serial killer to generate his own attention-grabbing pictures – for which he’s inevitably always first on the scene. His magazine then publishes the pictures, causing a sensation in a society where murder is almost unheard of, and tripling its sales figures.Hoping to impress his colleague Hayashi’s estranged wife Makoto, who he is stalking after a short affair (though she clearly sees things differently), Kato murders only men and women with the same name as her. Inevitably the police are suspicious, but can find no evidence as he is meticulous in his planning and execution. Kato’s editor is also suspicious, but is willing to ignore the evidence in front of him as sales boom.A pitch-dark satire on where ambition will take us, as well as our ghoulish obsession with true crime and our fascination with morally repellent serial killers (especially if they’re good-looking and charismatic), The Makoto Murders asks plenty of uncomfortable questions of the reader while never forgetting it’s first and foremost a page-turning thriller.
Richard Jerram spent thirty years using an economics doctorate from the LSE to find employment in London, Tokyo and Singapore. It has occurred to him that working as an economist in financial markets might be closer to being a crime fiction writer than many people realise. Richard frequently returns to Japan, where he lived for nearly two decades, and speaks the language fluently.The fertile soil of the UEA’s Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA gave rise to The Makoto Murders, Richard’s first novel. A noir thriller set in Tokyo, it won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger award in 2024. Richard also has an MA in Creative Writing from London’s City University. Richard lives near a park in London with his wife and, at times, children. When not writing, he reads. Swims enthusiastically. Reads. Runs slowly. Plays chess competently. Reads.
RESTRICTIONS: US/CAN (No Open Mkt) Categoria: Books: graphic novels (in preordine)
Uscita: 21/07/26
Ordinabile fino al 25/05/26
By Richard Jerram.
Prezzo di copertina: USD 18,99
Prezzo HoVistoCose: EUR 17,13
Data di uscita: 21/07/26
Final Order Cutoff: 25/05/26 (se ordinato entro questa data - un paio di giorni prima per permetterci di ordinarlo - le possibilitĂ che l'ordine verrĂ soddisfatto sono molto alte)
