The kaisho - Eric Lustbader (Nicholas Linnear #4; First UK edition)

It begins in Tokyo with a phone call. Mikio Okami, an old friend of Nicholas Linnear’s father, is in dire need of help. Many years ago, Nicholas promised his father he would come to Okami’s aid should he ever need it. What Nicholas does not know when he accepts the call is that Mikio Okami is the Kaisho, the boss of all bosses of the Yakuza, the Japanese underworld.

Okami possesses koryoku, the Illuminating Power, the sole path to a state of being that will allow Nicholas to explore safely the dark side of Tau-tau – the deadly psychic martial art – without being destroyed by it. In pursuit of this terrible secret, Nicholas must ply the tortuous canals of Venice, the back streets of Paris and, finally, the corridors of power of Tokyo. He will first become Okami’s human shield, and then the sacrificial victim in a conflict of harrowing consequences.

In America, Dominic Goldoni, one of the Mafia’s most feared godfathers, is slain in bizarre, ritualistic fashion. Lew Croaker – ex-cop and Nicholas Linnear’s best friend – is induced out of retirement to take this one last case, to solve a terrifying riddle. Is Goldoni’s murder simply the beginning of a vicious blood feud between the Mafia’s two most powerful families? Or is it the first clue to a darker, deeper mystery, an unthinkable cataclysm that involves not only the Mafia and the Yakuza, but also elements within the American government itself?

Ultimately, the answer does not lie in Washington, where Nicholas himself is under scrutiny by a ruthless Japan-bashing Senator, nor Tokyo, where the secret of koryoku waits for Nicholas in darkness like a serpent ready to strike.

It lies in the past, at a nexus point where ambition, greed and madness collide in an audacious scheme that spans decades.

These two men – Eric Lustbader’s most popular and enduring hero, Nicholas Linnear and his friend from The Ninja and The Miko, Lew Croaker – are pitted against the most potent forces they have ever faced in an epic novel that continues Lustbader’s incisive explorations of the dark side of the human mind, the effects of power on personal relationships, and the growing repercussions of the new world order in the 1990s.

The Kaisho is bullet-fast reading, a brilliant excursion into adventure and romance, intrigue and sex, providing a feast of insights into the mysteries of the Oriental mind.