We're back from our holiday travels. It got a little more exciting than we expected and I have a huge pile of pictures to go through so don't expect a blog post about it just yet.
But meanwhile, I just finished reading Half Life, the first thriller novel by Patrick Sherriff, also known as Our Man in Abiko. He is finishing up the sequel, so he's been posting the book on the net, one chapter at a time.
Hana Walker is a "hafu" orphan, that is a Japanese born of one Japanese and one foreign parent. She stumbles onto a job finding the half-Japanese daughter of a Mormon, and has to finish it ahead of the local Yakuza, during the aftermath of the 3/11 earthquake.
This is a good read. It's his first novel as far as I know, so it has some rough edges. A couple of scenes don't really work and the plot has a fair share of holes in it (any thriller storyline is well ventilated of course; it goes with the genre). But it's smooth reading with some unlikely and interesting characters, from circumstances you don't normally see in this kind of book.
You can get the ebook at Amazon on the above link, or start at chapter one and read through it online for free. Then you can join me in waiting for Patrick to finish the sequel already and see what Hana and uncle Kentaro get up to next.
Thanks for the write-up. I'm trying a few new things for the sequel -- a little more detail, especially about the baddies and "externalising her inner conflicts" -- giving her a Japanese boyfriend and an English one. They say your first 500,000 words are rubbish, so a few more novels till I iron out the rough edges. But much obliged for the post.
ReplyDelete