cover image Time of the Cricket

Time of the Cricket

William D. Blankenship. Dutton Books, $21.5 (304pp) ISBN 978-1-55611-430-4

A scandal that links politicians to gangsters in present-day Japan provides the motive for a series of brutal murders in this ultimately prosaic thriller. A lawsuit by stockholders of Seisa-ko Securities, whose top man has been accused of fraud, enrages the unsavory powers who control the investment company. So they assign Yakuza gangster Cricket Kimura to kill six of the suing stockholders with a samurai sword once owned by the Emperor Meiji, with hopes that others will be intimidated into backing down. When American Kay Williams, in Tokyo to buy the Meiji sword for a client, witnesses the murder of the antiques dealer who owned it, she ends up helping police detective Takeo Saji track down the killer. Blankenship delivers a few neat plot twists here, but his prose, though possessing the requisite thriller pace, never rises above the workmanlike. Also, though he provides his protagonists with interesting histories, both keep reverting to stereotype (the loner cop, the disobedient female constantly putting herself in danger); and their romance is never more than conventional. Readers of this genre will be disappointed with the novel's absence of atmosphere and hardboiled edge. The book ends up as bloodless as the violence it describes but doesn't evoke. 30,000 first printing. (Jan.)