Tokyo Girl: A Frank Ryan Mystery

by Brian Harvey

Overview

Piano tuner and jazz musician Frank Ryan is in Japan teaching bored housewives how to play piano. Then he gets a gig in a trendy underground bar and ends up ensnared with a young woman with a grudge and the crime boss who owns the bar. Drawn into Tokyo Girl’s vendetta, Frank stumbles into an underworld where transgressions are paid for by the flash of a razor-sharp cleaver. And for a pianist, that’s not a good thing.

Tokyo Girl is the follow-up to Beethoven’s Tenth, featuring reluctant sleuth Frank Ryan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459810785
Publisher:	Orca Book Publishers
Publication date:	08/23/2016
Series:	Frank Ryan Mystery
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
Lexile:	HL710L (what's this?)
File size:	780 KB

About the Author

Brian Harvey is a scientist and writer. He holds a PhD in marine biology and specializes in conservation of aquatic biodiversity. Brian’s first nonfiction book for a general audience, The End of the River, was published in 2008. He is currently finishing a second nonfiction book about sailing around Vancouver Island and is working on several fiction projects. Brian lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Editorial Reviews

"Quick paced and full of tension...Recommended."

CM Magazine

2016-05-24
Piano technician Frank Ryan, having fled his hometown in British Columbia after things got too hot there (Beethoven's Tenth, 2015), finds Tokyo just as dangerous in the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake.Most of the pupils Frank gives piano lessons to are no more talented than Mrs. Ogawa, whose life will clearly end before she masters "Clair de Lune." But a young woman named Akiko is a standout for her native gifts, her quick intelligence, and her shadowy protector Goto, the yakuza she calls her father who's actually her lover. On their very first meeting, Goto offers Frank, who's living from one cash-paying lesson to the next, a gig tickling the ivories in the Tom and Mary Jazz Lounge. The dream job, which provides a respectable base salary and hefty tips, seems too good to be true, and of course it is. Soon enough, Frank's hooked up with Momo, an attractive 30-year-old who works in a Shibuya pastry shop. Momo tells Frank that Goto killed her brother, Ryu, one of the Fukushima Fifty hired by the yakuza to contain the radioactive fallout at the stricken reactor. After she meets Frank at the Fifteen Love Hotel, she begs him to watch for a chance to peek inside Goto's alligator briefcase, which she's convinced is filled with ill-gotten cash and revealing papers, like a complete list of the Fukushima Fifty. It all sounds so simple. Thanks to Harvey's parsimonious plotting and his hero's laconic voice, it actually is simple. Even if the hero's Tokyo fling ends on a decidedly downbeat note, this little prose poem is as pellucid and finely wrought as a haiku.

Kirkus Reviews