Kaoru Takamura

In 1990s Tokyo, five men who meet weekly at the racetrack form an unlikely alliance, united by shared grievances against Hinode Beer-a company whose history of labor exploitation stretches back decades. Together they hatch a kidnapping and extortion plot that unfolds as both a crime thriller and a critique of corporate capitalism in modern Japan.

This second half of Lady Joker, by Kaoru Takamura, the Grand Dame of Japanese crime fiction, concludes the breathtaking saga introduced in Volume One. Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case which terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines the circumstances of this watershed episode in modern Japanese history and brings into riveting focus the lives and motivations of the victims, the perpetrators, the heroes and the villains. As the shady networks linking corporations to syndicates are brought to light, the stakes rise, and some of the professionals we have watched try to fight their way through this crisis will lose everything-some even their lives. Will the culprits ever be brought to justice? More importantly-what is justice?