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This very long procedural is maybe most interesting for the novelty of it's approach: our protagonist is a detective, but one who works for the media office, and as a result, instead of cracking cases, most of what he does is negotiating between the warring factions, the investigators on one side of him, and the press who report out the crimes on the other. And that's kind of the story here, the conflicts between the desire for knowledge and the need to hold back knowledge for ethical and investigative reasons. There's a large, overarching bit of business, about administrative re-classifications of the prefectural police offices, as well as a cold case murder that occurred in "64," the last year of the Showa Emperor's reign (1989, if I'm reading wikipedia correctly) that has, in the story present (2002) almost reached the statute of limitations.
This description probably tells you if you're interested in reading this. I finished it, and I kind of think it could be set at any institution of sufficient longevity-- my school, for example, could be the setting as well as a police station. The cold case murder, which does ultimately get taken up here, is ultimately solved in a brute force manner, which is starkly in contrast to the idiosyncratic leaping style that you expect from brilliant detectives. It's kind of novel in that way, but I'm not sure it's particularly exciting from the narrative side.
An odd book, with a really lovely design.
This description probably tells you if you're interested in reading this. I finished it, and I kind of think it could be set at any institution of sufficient longevity-- my school, for example, could be the setting as well as a police station. The cold case murder, which does ultimately get taken up here, is ultimately solved in a brute force manner, which is starkly in contrast to the idiosyncratic leaping style that you expect from brilliant detectives. It's kind of novel in that way, but I'm not sure it's particularly exciting from the narrative side.
An odd book, with a really lovely design.