The Last Train — Michael Pronko

THE LAST TRAIN is the gripping new Tokyo-based mystery by multi-award-winning author Michael Pronko

Detective Hiroshi Shimizu investigates white collar crime inTokyo. 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.
 
Takamatsu drags Hiroshi out to the hostess clubs and skyscraper offices of Tokyo in search of the killer. She's trying to escape Japan for a new life by playing a high-stakes game of insider information. To find her, Hiroshi goes deeper and deeper into Tokyo's intricate, ominous market for buying and selling the most expensive land in the world. 
 
When Takamatsu inexplicably disappears, Hiroshi teams upwith ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi. They scour Tokyo's sacred temples, corporateoffices and industrial wastelands to find out where Takamatsu went, and why onewoman would be driven to murder when she seems to have it all.
 
After years in America and lost in neat, clean spreadsheets,Hiroshi confronts the stark realities of the biggest city in the world, where insideinformation can travel in a flash from the top investment firms to the bottomof the working world, where street-level punks and teenage hostesses sell theirsouls for a small cut of highly lucrative land deals.
 
Hiroshi's determined to cut through Japan's ambiguities--anddangers--to find the murdering ex-hostess before she extracts her finalrevenge--which just might be him.