β Scribed by Barry Eisler
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Barry Eisler's half-breed freelance assassin John Rain returns to Tokyo for a second outing in Hard Rain , the sequel to Eisler's stunning 2002 debut, Rain Fall. Once again Rain is working with, or at least parallel to, Tatsu, a wily veteran of Japan's FBI equivalent, who aims to cleanse the Japanese government of its systemic corruption. To further this goal, he's persuaded the ever-cautious Rain to take out Murakami, a brutal gangster and hitman who specializes in making his killings look like suicide, a specialty Rain thought was his alone. Liquidating the dangerous and elusive Murakami proves to be a difficult task, however, one that leads to personal loss for Rain, and sets the plot on course for a climax that hits with the power of a well-delivered roundhouse kick.
Eisler builds on Rain's self-enforced isolation and loneliness as he expertly shows the reader Tokyo as channeled by Chandler, transforming the burgeoning metropolis into a noir catacomb of dimly lit hostess bars, scheming bureaucrats, shadowy intelligence agents, and outlaw martial arts dojos where thugged-up yakuza train for illicit death matches.
While the plot becomes complicated toward the novel's conclusion, Rain is a refreshing and complex character whom readers will want to see return for another installment. If you've a yen for a thriller that mixes suspense, intrigue, and action with a Japanese flavor and a hardboiled American attitude, Eisler's Hard Rain is an excellent choice. --Benjamin Reese
Rain Fall (2002), Eisler's first book about Japanese-American Vietnam vet John Rain, a hired assassin for government agencies in Tokyo and Washington, worked so well that the author wisely decided to keep all the elements intact in this captivating follow-up. Once again, the nightscape of Tokyo is painted in beautifully dark tones, scored to the live jazz of the clubs where Rain drinks from a menu of expensive single malt whiskeys. Once again, Rain knows everything about the arts of killing and avoiding surveillance-from the sound a man's ribs make when he's crushed to death trying to lift too much weight to how to use a container of very hot tea to ruin a would-be pursuer's day. Once again Rain has to decide whether any of the people he's working for-the shrewd Tatsu, a veteran agent of Japan's FBI who seems to be dedicated to battling high-level corruption; various shady American CIA agents-are to be trusted. And once again, Rain realizes how alone he really is, despite the promise of love and companionship from a couple of very interesting women. "I had understood even as a child that to be half Japanese is to be half something else, and to be half something else is to be... chigatte. Chigatte, meaning different,' but equally meaningwrong.' The language, like the culture, makes no distinction." The plot itself is a complicated one about a CIA scheme called Crepuscular, designed to clean up-or possibly further corrupt-Japan's tangled mess of business and politics. Eisler acknowledges the help of experts in many areas, but it's his own impressive literary skills that make his John Rain such a fascinating, touching and wholly believable character.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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