Buddha Kiss

Tasker's second novel (after Silent Thunder) has a ripped-from-the headlines feel as it relates the doings of shady investment bankers and a fanatical religious cult intent on establishing mind control with the help of a dangerous new drug. The plot is part mystery, part financial thriller. The mystery concerns the death of Yuriko Sano, a 23-year-old woman first found floating in a bathtub in a ""Love Hotel"" by a disoriented Tokyo bank manager, Tamura, who is jarred from drugged oblivion by an earthquake and leaves precipitously. Later, when Yuriko's body again surfaces, washed up in Tokyo Bay, her father hires maverick detective Kazuo Mori to find out how she died. Meanwhile, British securities analyst Richard Mitchell is being pressured to deliver a positive recommendation on a trading company by the head of research, Terumasa Yazawa. Mitchell can't make sense of the company's balance sheet, so he starts investigating. As Yazawa does everything in his power to intimidate and coerce Mitchell, Mori and Mitchell trace their respective cases up to the gates of the macabre Peace Technology cult and its charismatic leader, Ono. British writer Tasker, a longtime Tokyo resident and Japan's top-ranked financial analyst, provides well-observed details and cross-cultural references that make this tale a feast as full of confounding surprises as the sushi dinner depicted here, with a final course of poisonous blowfish. The emphasis on the detective work of Mori and Mitchell allows Tasker to develop a sense of the dramatic and divisive forces now erupting in tradition-loving Japanese society. This rich atmosphere and social acuity raises his second novel well above the standard in the genre. (Sept.)