Like Andrew Taylor (see previous post), Robert Goddard is a recipient of the CWA Diamond Dagger Award for his long career in putting out superbly plotted crime fiction. Mostly he’s a writer of stand-alone novels, but his latest book takes us back to Japan where we first met Umiko Wada in The Fine Art of Invisible Detection and a case that brought her to England and a convoluted mystery that helped her cut her teeth as a detective.
In The Fine Art of Uncanny Prediction, Wada has taken over the investigative business set up by her late boss, Kazuto Kodaka. Wada is a middle-aged woman who was widowed young. She’s outwardly unremarkable and, like many fictional private investigators, her work is her life. With a brother in New York, it’s left to Wada to check in on her mother, which is problematic in more ways than one.
The story gets going with a new case, an elderly man who has lost contact with his son. Fumito Nagata is worried his son, Manjiro may be depressed, even suicidal, following the collapse of his business, but Fumito is unable to contact him. Mr Nagata wants Wada to find him and report back. The younger Nagata is also the nephew of Teruki Jinno, head of a prosperous construction business that has been in the family for decades, a business that did well out of rebuilding Tokyo after the war.
Wada’s investigation will take us back to those dark days after Tokyo was firebombed, into a labyrinthine plot full of strands but all focused on power and money. She’s also being pestered by her brother to see to what’s going on with their mother – she’s taken on a lodger, an ex-Sumo wrestler who has fallen from grace. Wada’s brother is appalled.
‘I have you down as a solitary person. Is that right?’
‘It is not wrong.’
He frowned at her. ‘Do you ever let your guard down, Wada?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘Am I likely to see it happen?’
‘Unlikely, I would say.’
Then he grinned. ‘See, that’s what I like about you. You’re just so damn honest.’
The story also slips back in time to the mid 1990s and a case being investigated by Kodaka, again involving the Jinno construction company. Kodaka is asked to determine the recipient of large sums of money, paid into a bank account by the late founder of the company for over fifty years. The case will also have Kodaka asking questions around the Kobe Sensitive, the mysterious woman who phoned in a prediction about the Kobe earthquake – a prediction that was ignored but proved to be tragically accurate.
The plot flips between the two time periods, and the cases of the two detectives that will, of course, show how they connect towards the end. There’s a lot going on and a raft of characters to remember – I made frequent use of the character list at the start of the book. But I persevered, because Goddard is such a brilliant storyteller, there’s a thread of humour running through it all and Wada is such an interesting character – one of those ordinary people flung into extraordinary circumstances and somehow coping surprisingly well.
Yes, there’s plenty of danger, and Wada can’t ever be sure who to trust. There’s her connection to Kodaka, a more typical fictional detective who drinks too much, but knows his stuff, and has a will to stand up for the underdog. I enjoyed how the story includes how the two met, and how Wada became involved in the tricky business of detecting, much to her mother’s disappointment.
The setting of Tokyo seems very real – we get the trains, the distinctive suburbs and Tokyo’s hinterland. There’s a visit to San Francisco too – both settings come to life on the page. Underneath what turns out to be a ripping good yarn, full of twists, are thoughts on the devastation and ongoing effects of war, and those who prosper from it. The possibility of predicting earthquakes – both scientifically and through a kind of ‘gift’ is a fairly original concept for a detective novel and adds a good deal of interest.
There are still plenty of surprises as it as it all comes together towards the end, and as a reader I felt I was in the hands of a seasoned professional, an author that makes it all work so cleverly, creating a supremely satisfying read. Not that I was surprised. He’s done it so often before. The Fine Art of Uncanny Prediction is a four and a half star read from me.