A Copycat Killer

Autorentext

Born on February 29th, 1948, in Fukuoka Prefecture, Jiro Akagawa is one of Japan’s most prolific and celebrated mystery writers. In a career that spans several decades, he has written over 650 books and sold more than 330 million copies. Working as a salaried employee for twelve years after graduating high school, he won the All Yomimono New Mystery Writers' Prize for a short novel titled Ghost Train while working a full-time job. In 1978, he became a bestselling novelist with the *Mikeneko Holmes no Suiri *which recounts the adventures of a detective and his adopted cat; the beloved series continues today with over fifty-five novels, seventy including short stories. It was only then that he quit his corporate job and turned his full attention to writing. He won the Kadokawa Novel Prize in 1980 with Requiem for an Evil Wife, the Japan Mystery Literature Award in 2005, and the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for Literature in 2016 with Tokyo Year Zero. Many of his hit titles have been adapted for the screen and stage, including award-winning films such as Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981), Detective Story (1983), Early Spring Story (1985), Who Do I Choose? (1989), and Chizuko’s Younger Sister (1991). The first Mikeneko Holmes book has also been made into a film and two television series that aired from 1979 to 1984, as well as in 2012.

Klappentext

The second novel in one of the most beloved crime series of all time - more than 25 million copies of the Mikeneko Holmes books sold in Japan

Detective Katayama is leaving the force . . .

. . . eventually. But with his resignation letter gathering dust on his boss's desk, he is faced with a case that draws him back in. Two sisters murdered in the same room in the same apartment two years apart. One died almost peacefully, a smile on her face and a bullet in her heart, while the other was brutally strangled.

Curiously, there seems to be a connection with the cultural centre where his sister Harumi now works. Days before the second murder, someone signed up to every single course in the name of the victim of the first.

Normally Holmes can be relied on to drag in clues. Instead, she remains aloof, her feline face inscrutable, as if biding her time. But with the murders stacking up, what can she possibly be waiting for?