Lady First

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Murder is back, and it’s nastier than ever…

Fujikawa in southern Japan is finally getting over the shock murder of a resident university head and, three years later, the strangling of a local child – when terror strikes the quiet, provincial town once more.

When young Mayumi Ikeuchi is killed on her way home from her job at The Paradise nightclub in a Fujikawa park, there isn’t a shortage of suspects.

These include Mr Tani – Mayumi’s boss – who likes to leer over the girls who work for him, and Atsushi Taniguchi, a man who seems quite normal to the outside world but is free with his fists around his wife, Yui. There is also Nose-san, a loner who lives with his aged, incontinent mother, with witnesses hearing the sounds of brutal, physical arguments coming from his house. Even Mayumi’s sister is reported to have been overly possessive of the girl, threatening her when Mayumi had declared she wanted to strike out on her own.

Lise Foster and Yui Taniguchi forge an unlikely friendship after the death of Mayumi: one is a victim of violence and the other may become one.

Lise is a teacher at the local school, living close to the murder site in Ogawa Woods, and is it her imagination or is there someone sinister lurking outside her home in the shadows?

Could Lise be next?

For Chief Inspector Inoue and Inspector Kubo – Yui’s brother – and their colleagues, it is a race against time to find the perpetrator before he strikes again.

Praise for Lea O’Harra

“A thrilling page-turner.” - Tom Kasey, best-selling author of Cold Kill

"Crime fiction, especially the more traditional type based on deductive reason, is sometimes seen as out of touch with reality...Lea O'Harra shows...the traditional form is not necessarily regressive or conservative." - Paul Johnston, author of the Alex Mavros' series

Lea O’Harra is the pen name of Wendy Jones Nakanishi. American by birth, Wendy spent seven years in the UK getting an MA and a Ph.D. in 18th-century English literature. She has been resident in Japan since the spring of 1984, employed full-time since her arrival as a tenured member of staff at a private university on the island of Shikoku. She has published widely in her academic field and in recent years has been writing creative non-fiction, describing her life as an American academic living in rural Japan, the wife of a Japanese farmer and the mother of three sons. Lady First is the third book in the Inspector Inoue murder mystery series.