Sins as Scarlet – Nicolás Obregón

Former homicide detective Kosuke Iwata is on the run from his past. Living in LA and working as a private detective he spends his days spying on unfaithful spouses and his nights with an unavailable woman. Still he cannot forget the family he lost in Tokyo. But that all changes when a figure from his old life appears at his door demanding his help.

Meredith Nichol, a transgender woman and his wife’s sister, has been found strangled on the lonely train tracks behind Skid Row. Soon he discovers that the devil is at play in the City of Angels and Meredith’s death wasn’t the hate crime the police believe it to be. 

This is dangerous territory. But Iwata knows that risking his life and future is the only way to silence the demons of his past.  Reluctantly throwing himself back in to the dangerous existence he only just escaped, Iwata discovers a seedy world of corruption, exploitation and murder – and a river of sin flowing through LA’s underbelly, Mexico’s dusty borderlands, and deep within his own past.

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I enjoyed Nicolás Obregón’s debut novel Blue Light Yokohama which was set in Tokyo. and featured Inspector Kosuke Iwata.  You can find my earlier review HERE.

In Sins as Scarlet there have been big changes in the life of Inspector Kosuke Iwata.

He is no longer an inspector with the Tokyo Homicide Department. He’s no longer a Police Detective. Having left Japan in 2011 with almost nothing, he’s now living in Los Angeles and working as a private investigator, mostly providing evidence of cheating husbands and wives to his clients. He has also reconnected with his mother Nozomi although the relationship still seems a bit distant and a lot of things are left unsaid. You get the feeling Iwata is fairly self-contained.

When his late wife’s mother comes into his office demanding that Iwata investigates her son’s recent murder, he feels he has no choice but to investigate. Julian had transitioned into Meredith years before and the Police were treating it as just another hate crime, saying terrible things about Meredith and basically doing nothing.

The investigation takes Iwata into some dark, dangerous and violent places and also

across the US – Mexican border. He uncovers crimes involving more missing transgender women and is taken into a world of corruption, exploitation and human trafficking and puts himself in extreme danger.

As well as the present day investigation, we’re also taken back to Tokyo 1975 to learn of his mother’s story and everything she endured; how she came to abandon Iwata in a Japanese orphanage and then came back to get him with her new husband years later. I liked this as it filled in a few things that were hinted at in the earlier book. We also got a little bit of Iwata’s back story and what happened to his wife and child and I think this helped explain some of Iwata’s issues and later actions.

It’s quite a complex, layered story. At times there was more violence and brutality than I would normally want to read about but I find Iwata quite a compelling character. He’s tenacious and a skilled detective but also very self contained and reluctant to let people get too close but by the end of the book I thought I could see a hint of some softening at the edges.

If there’s a third book in the series I suspect we might find a slightly different Iwata.

[My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin UK – Michael Joseph for providing a digital review copy.]

Blue Light Yokohama – Nicolás Obregón

Setagaya ward, Tokyo
Inspector Kosuke Iwata, newly transferred to Tokyo’s homicide department, is assigned a new partner and a secondhand case.

Blunt, hard as nails and shunned by her colleagues, Assistant Inspector Noriko Sakai is a partner Iwata decides it would be unwise to cross.

A case that’s complicated – a family of four murdered in their own home by a killer who then ate ice cream, surfed the web and painted a hideous black sun on the bedroom ceiling before he left in broad daylight. A case that so haunted the original investigator that he threw himself off the city’s famous Rainbow Bridge.

Carrying his own secret torment, Iwata is no stranger to pain. He senses the trauma behind the killer’s brutal actions. Yet his progress is thwarted in the unlikeliest of places.

Fearing corruption among his fellow officers, tracking a killer he’s sure is only just beginning and trying to put his own shattered life back together, Iwata knows time is running out before he’s taken off the case or there are more killings . . .

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I’m not sure if it is coincidence or whether I am subconsciously travelling the world via new titles but recently I have read novels set in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and now Japan (and the next one on my reading list is set in India!)

I heard about Blue Light Yokohama via an email and the description intrigued me, especially since the book was inspired by true events.

Inspector Kosuke Iwata had been signed off work for a while and on his return is transferred to Tokyo’s Homicide Department. He is allocated a new partner, Noriko Sakai, and given a secondhand case where a Korean family of four had been murdered in their own home, complicated by the fact that the original investigator had committed suicide a few days earlier.

It soon becomes clear that both Iwata and Sakai have their own issues. Snippets of Iwata’s troubled, painful, past are slowly revealed. Sakai comes across as hard but efficient. She doesn’t mix with her colleagues and some of them try to give her a hard time.

When they start investigating the brutal murders it looks like there could have been a ritualistic element to them but no real clues.

When more cases turn up, Iwata thinks they may have a serial killer, but they get little support from the bosses. Apart from the Korean family, there just doesn’t seem to be anything linking the victims. As they investigate further Iwata deals with bullying, corruption, incompetence and his own demons. It also appears that someone is out to destroy his career.

Nicolás Obregón sets a wonderful scene and although I have never been to Tokyo, I felt a sense of being there, even the bleak places.

It’s quite a complex story because of the references to Iwata’s recent past, and also his childhood/adolescence, as well as the present, but I found I was able to follow it. Initially I had some trouble with the unfamiliar Japanese names and places but you get used to that. I liked the ending and for me it was a real page-turner.

Is it different to any other police procedural/crime thriller set somewhere else? Yes, I believe it is. I felt I got a glimpse of some aspect of Japanese life. Whether it is an accurate portrayal, I don’t know, but it makes for a good debut novel.

Author’s webpage is here.

My thanks to NetGalley and the UK publishers Penguin UK – Michael Joseph for an advance copy.