Until pain, memory, resignation and fury all alike are subsumed by the one possible conclusion, a thing or two may just be worth doing. Thus a nameless former cop who should never have become a private detective awaits clients in a dingy office across the street from a Chinese restaurant. Impeccably paced and snappily told even when the truth grows murky, hardboiled has never come as smooth or as pure as in this choice distillation by way of Tokyo. Warning: no dogs cute or otherwise appear in this work, in or out of water.
Legendary manga milestone Be-Bop High School creator Kazuhiro Kiuchi made his debut as a novelist in 2004 with the action thriller Shield of Straw (recently adapted into a major motion picture directed by Takashi Miike). The second of Kiuchi's growing body of prose offerings, A Dog in Water is his first to become available in English translation.
