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Don’t miss our feature with Barry Lancet in the Hon Podcast: Sense of Place—Tokyo
Barry Lancet’s long-running series of thrillers center around Jim Brodie, and antiques dealer and inheritor of his father’s security company in Tokyo. Real page-turners!
Book 2: Tokyo Kill
In the second thriller of this new series from “a fresh voice in crime fiction” (Kirkus Reviews), antiques dealer-turned-P.I. Jim Brodie matches wits with an elusive group of killers chasing a long-lost treasure that has a dangerous history.
“A stellar novel of action, adventure, and intrigue. Jim Brodie is a true twenty-first century hero…On page after page of Tokyo Kill, skeletons bang on every closet door longing to be set free—and Barry Lancet delivers.”
—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Lincoln Myth
“Lancet’s familiarity with Japanese history and culture, combined with his storytelling skills, make this a first-rate mystery…a clear indicator that the author considers Jim Brodie a series-worthy character. He’d be right, too.”
—Booklist
“Boasting surefire characters including the taciturn, thick-chested chief detective Noda and notorious crime figure called TNT who owes Brodie favors…[Lancet’s] series remains highly distinctive.”
—Kirkus Reviews
When an elderly World War II veteran shows up unannounced at Brodie Security begging for protection, the staff thinks he’s just a paranoid old man. He offers up a story connected to the war and to Chinese Triads operating in present-day Tokyo, insisting that he and his few surviving army buddies are in danger.
Fresh off his involvement in solving San Francisco’s Japantown murders, antiques dealer Jim Brodie had returned to Tokyo for some R&R, and to hunt down a rare ink painting by the legendary Japanese Zen master Sengai for one of his clients—not to take on another case with his late father’s P.I. firm. But out of respect for the old soldier, Brodie agrees to provide a security detail, thinking it’ll be an easy job and end when the man comes to his senses.
Instead, an unexpected, brutal murder rocks Brodie and his crew, sending them deep into the realm of the Triads, Chinese spies, kendo warriors, and an elusive group of killers whose treachery spans centuries—and who will stop at nothing to complete their mission.
Book 1: JapanTown
Best of Debut of the Year from Suspense Magazine
Winner of the Barry Award for Best Debut Novel
In this “sophisticated international thriller” (TheNew York Times Book Review), an American antiques-dealer-turned-reluctant-private-eye must use his knowledge of Japanese culture to unravel a major murder in San Francisco—before he and his daughter become targets themselves.
San Francisco antiques dealer Jim Brodie receives a call one night from a friend at the SFPD: an entire family has been senselessly gunned down in the Japantown neighborhood of the bustling city. As an American born and raised in Japan and part-owner of his father’s Tokyo private investigation firm, Brodie has advised the local police in the past, but the near-perfect murders in Japantown are like nothing he’s ever encountered.
With his array of Asian contacts and fluency in Japanese, Brodie follows leads gathered from a shadow powerbroker, a renegade Japanese detective, and the elusive tycoon at the center of the Japantown murders along a trail that takes him from the crime scene in California to terrorized citizens and informants in Japan. Step by step, he unravels a web of intrigue stretching back centuries and unearths a deadly secret that threatens not only his life but also the lives of his entire circle of family and friends. “Readers will want to see more of the talented Jim Brodie, with his expertise in Japanese culture, history, and martial arts” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Book 3: Pacific Burn
Japanese antiques dealer and PI Jim Brodie goes up against a killer operating on both sides of the Pacific in Barry Lancet’s Pacific Burn—“a page-turning, globe-spanning tale of murder, suspense, and intrigue that grabs and holds your attention from beginning to end” (Nelson DeMille).
In recognition for his role in solving the Japantown murders in San Francisco, antiques dealer and sometime-PI Jim Brodie has just been brought on as the liaison for the mayor’s new Pacific Rim Friendship Program. Brodie in turn recruits his friend, the renowned Japanese artist Ken Nobuki, and after a promising meeting with city officials and a picture-perfect photo op, Brodie and Nobuki leave City Hall for a waiting limo.
But as soon as they exit the building, a sniper attacks them from the roof of the Asian Art Museum. Brodie soon realizes that, with the suspicious and untimely death of Nobuki’s oldest son a week earlier in Napa Valley, someone may be targeting his friend’s family—and killing them off one by one.
Suspects are nearly too numerous to name—and could be in the United States or anywhere along the Pacific Rim. The quest for answers takes Brodie from his beloved San Francisco to Washington, DC, in a confrontation with the DHS, the CIA, and the FBI; then on to Tokyo, Kyoto, and beyond, in search of what his Japanese sources tell him is a legendary killer in both senses of the word—said to be more rumor than real, but deadlier than anything else they’ve ever encountered if the whispers are true.
In the third book in “what will likely be a long and successful series” (San Francisco Magazine), Barry Lancet delivers his most exciting Jim Brodie novel yet.
Book 4: The Spy Across the Table
In this fast-paced fourth thriller featuring Japanese antiquities expert Jim Brodie, a double-murder at the Kennedy Center forces the PI into a dangerous game of espionage—putting him in the crosshairs of the Chinese, North Korean, and American governments.
Jim Brodie is an antiques dealer, Japan expert, and second-generation private investigator. When two of his friends are murdered backstage at a Kennedy Center performance in Washington, DC, he’s devastated—and determined to hunt down the killer. He’s not the only one.
After the attack, Brodie is summoned to the White House. The First Lady was the college roommate of one of the victims, and she enlists Brodie—off the books—to use his Japanese connections to track down the assassin. Homeland Security head Tom Swelley is furious that the White House is meddling and wants Brodie off the case. Why? For the same reason a master Chinese spy known only as Zhou, one of the most dangerous men alive, appears on the scene: Those murders were no random act of violence.
Brodie flies to Tokyo to attend the second of two funerals, when his friend’s daughter Anna is kidnapped during the ceremony. It is then Brodie realizes that the murders were simply bait to draw her out of hiding. Anna, it seems, is the key architect of a top-secret NSA program that gathers the personal secrets of America’s most influential leaders. Secrets so damaging that North Korea and China will stop at nothing to get them.
“As usual in a Barry Lancet novel, the action scenes are first-rate…and the knowledge he imparts about Asian politics and culture is deep. A solid, consistently smart thriller” (Kirkus Reviews), The Spy Across the Table takes us on a wild ride around the world and keeps us on the edge of our seats until the very end.
About the Author:
Barry Lancet is a Barry Award–winning author and finalist for the Shamus Award. He has lived in Japan for more than twenty-five years. His former position as an editor at one of the nation’s largest publishers gave him access to the inner circles in traditional and business fields most outsiders are never granted, and an insider’s view that informs his writing. He is the author of the Jim Brodie series: The Spy Across the Table; Pacific Burn; Tokyo Kill; and Japantown, which received four citations for Best First Novel and has been optioned by J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot Productions, in association with Warner Brothers. Visit Lancet at BarryLancet.com or on Twitter @BarryLancet.