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The Fine Art of Invisible Detection

Information about the book
An unlikely heroine. An even more unlikely detective. And a cold case that's resurfacing with deadly consequences. The next book from 'the world's greatest storyteller' (Guardian ).
 
Tokyo, Japan
Umiko Wada has had enough excitement in life. With an overbearing mother and her husband recently murdered, she just wants to keep her head down. As a secretary to a private detective, her life is pleasantly filled with coffee runs and paperwork.
 
That is, until her boss takes on a new case. A case that is surrounded by shadows. A case that means Wada will have to leave Tokyo and travel to London.
 
London, England
Nick Miller never knew his father, and was always told he wasn't missing much. But when an old friend of his late mother says there are things that Nick needs to know about his parents, he can't ignore it.
 
When a chance encounter brings Wada and Nick together, they couldn't know the series of violent events set off by their investigations. And when they discover Nick's father might have been the only witness to a dark secret forever buried, they realise there are some powerful people who will do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
EXTRACT
 
ONE
Umikwada wasn’t a private detective. She just worked for one. She answered his phone, managed his accounts, kept his records, talked  through problems  with him, greeted his visitors, fetched him bento-boxed lunches and  made him tea, which he’d taken to  drinking   virtually  all  day  now  he’d  supposedly   given  up smoking.
 
The  sign  on  the  door  of  the  seventh-f loor  office  in  the Nihonbashi district  of Tokyo  where Wada  spent  her working days  described  it  as  the  premises  of  the  Kodaka Detective Agency. But there was only one detective in the agency: fifty- eight-year-old Kazuto  Kodaka. There’d been several detectives, apparently, when Kodaka senior was in charge. But his son pre- ferred  to operate  alone.  What  would  happen  if and  when his body  collapsed  under  the  strain  of his unhealthy  habits  and chronic overwork  was easy to predict. Wada would need a new job.  Which  wasn’t  a  happy  thought.  She  liked  this  job.  It suited her.
 
She always thought of herself as Wada  rather  than  Umiko because that  was how Kodaka referred  to her. It had  seemed disrespectful at first. Now she was rather fond of it. It reinforced an  image  of  herself  she’d  honed  over  years  of  being  alone. Simple, strong, independent. That was Wada. Umiko was a girl she’d once been. The Wada she’d become was nearly forty-seven, though  she looked  younger,  probably  because,  as her mother regularly  reminded  her, she’d never had  children  to raise and worry over.
 
That wasn’t Wada’s fault, as her mother used to acknowledge but now seemed inclined to forget. She was a widow. Her hus- band Tomohiko – Hiko, as she’d called him and still did, in the privacy of her own thoughts  – had been killed in the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway back in 1995, though technically he hadn’t actually died until twelve years later. The decade and a bit he’d spent in a coma froze Wada’s life. Her mother  had still hoped,  when he finally expired,  that  Wada  would  find some- body else to marry. But it had never happened.
 
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The Fine Art of Invisible Detection          
 
by Robert Goddard
 
 
 
 
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