Collector of Secrets

After living in Tokyo for a year, American Max Travers, the hero of Goodfellow’s stellar debut, wants to quit his job teaching English, but Yoko, the unethical and manipulative owner of the language school he works for, refuses to return his passport in a ploy to get him to stay in Japan. When Max breaks into Yoko’s office late one night in an attempt to retrieve it, he finds burglars already there ransacking the place. In the chaos that follows, he grabs a satchel that turns out to contain a journal kept by a prince who was Emperor Hirohito’s first cousin. It details decades of imperial Japan’s plunder of Southeast Asia’s most valuable treasures during WWII. Suddenly on the run from the Yakuza mob and the Japanese police, Travers must stay alive long enough to understand the mind-blowing scope of the conspiracies revealed within the diary. Relentlessly paced, meticulously plotted, and richly described, this is a page-turner of the highest order. [em](Aug.) [/em]