A massive doorstopper of a thriller at well over 600 pages and a million plus copies bestseller in its native Japan. Beginning with the kidnapping and murder in 1989 of a seven-year old Tokyo schoolgirl which has never been solved and has brought shame on the police department then dealing with the case, the story moves fourteen years later to policeman Mikami who has been moved from CID to a lesser administrative PR position and takes it upon himself to revisit the crime, spurred on by his own sense of failure with his own teenage daughter and slowly begins to assemble the intricate pieces together until a shocking conclusion is reached with a twist you don't see coming. Slow building, meticulous in its insistence on unfolding all the procedural elements of a Japanese crime investigation and its political ramifications, this is a novel that insidiously grows on you until you are fully captive of its narrative flow and can't put it down.
'This novel is a real, out-of-the-blue original. I've never read anything like it' New York Times Book Review THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED THE ITV SERIES STARRING KEVIN McKIDD AND VINETTE ROBINSON. THE MILLION-SELLING JAPANESE CRIME PHENOMENON, NOW A UK BESTSELLER. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 CWA INTERNATIONAL DAGGER. NAMED IN NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017. SIX FOUR. THE NIGHTMARE NO PARENT COULD ENDURE. THE CASE NO DETECTIVE COULD SOLVE. THE TWIST NO READER COULD PREDICT. For five days in January 1989, the parents of a seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl sat and listened to the demands of their daughter's kidnapper. They would never learn his identity. They would never see their daughter again. For the fourteen years that followed, the Japanese public listened to the police's apologies. They would never forget the botched investigation that became known as 'Six Four'. They would never forgive the authorities their failure. For one week in late 2002, the press officer attached to the police department in question confronted an anomaly in the case. He could never imagine what he would uncover. He would never have looked if he'd known what he would find. Loved Six Four and want more Yokoyama? Then why not try Seventeen or Prefecture D . . .
