Joseph Mark Brewer

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P.I. Shig Sato stumbles into the case of his career. Will he get to the truth when all he hears is lies?

A top cop must catch a killer under unblinking media glare. But will his famiily's ancient ties to a yakuza dynasty stop justice in its tracks? The Gangster's Son. http://ow.ly/qkHT50LqybZ

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It's - and a great time to Discover the World of Shig Sato http://ow.ly/fAnz50KftWT - Find out why reviewers call it

The Gangster's Son Crime | Detective | Multicultural | Police Procedural | Thriller

It's - and a great time to Discover the World of Shig Sato http://ow.ly/1Mpa50KftT3 - Find out why reviewers call it

The Gangster's Son Crime | Detective | Multicultural | Police Procedural | Thriller

It's - and a great time to Discover the World of Shig Sato http://ow.ly/lG7850KftMB - Find out why reviewers call it

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Hi gang,
I'm sorry I haven't been around as much as I'd like. News of the day keeps a journalist busy, and I have to admit the new Shig Sato mystery has been something of a challenge.
So I want to say thanks and reward your patience. Here's a glimps of the new mystery, Geisha Girl.

Monday, June 8, 1992. Late afternoon.
It was a fatal mistake, underestimating the cult.
Two police offers, one a veteran detective, the other a detective not so green but not so seasoned either, had drawn the short straws.
And every officer assigned to the station’s anti-organized crime crew was jealous, anticipating the drug bust, one that could change a career.
Headquarters would give the final word. Co-ordinating with other teams was nearly finished.
Then came word that the task force supervisor wanted leads to the blind guru’s goup of religious nuts followed more closely than before, with the kidnapping of a lawyer’s famiiy and accusations of extortion and ritual initiations involving L*D and in some extreme cases, shock therapy.
What the job really meant was dealing with white robes fanatics unable to tell the difference between science fiction and the Bhagavad Gita. Rich kids duped into giving their money to smart con men by any means necessary.
Undercover duty. Hide in plain sight.
The older, senior detecive wasn’t eaager to give his career a boost. “Just being in the same room as those lunatics makes me want to get drunk,” he said. As for the junior detective, a collar was a collar but he knew he need to make a good showing. The junior detective respected his senior partner but didn’t care for the old man’s careless ways. It seemed the senior detective spent a lot of time talking and little time watching. The interrogation room was where the senior detective shined. From the first day of their paring and their very first arrest six months before, the junior detective made sure to witness them all.
The cult seemed like any other, a charasmatic leader with devoted followers chasing after benign truth with wallets open and cash flowing into the charasmatic leader’s coffers, the leader attended to by ruthless lieutenants whose skills of persuasion and subterfuge kept the rank and file blissfully happy or benignly enslaved, and the suspicous sent scampering.
Slaves. That term, and cult, were the only terms the senior detective used. The young detective said nothing about that.
Their first stop was one of the smaller halls near a semi-important commuter rail station on Tokyo’s West side, one that stretched to an almost-shabby suburb, a station surrounded by shops, restaurants, bars, language schools, beauty salons, barber shops — all first stops or last stops before the average Japanese worker, in suit or coveralls, brogans or heels, went home. The cult knew as with most things, selling was a numbers game, and with thousands of people passing through the station, their message of spiritual enlightment was bound to strike home with a certain few, and an acolyte with a pleasing place offering tea and small talk and indoctination close by, most of the prospects welcomed sitting down no matter what the spiel.
That was the junior detective’s assignment: wander around near the cult’s almost-dingy hall with a look of a clean-cut curious idiot seeking answers to life’s deeper questions. The senior detective watched from across the street, wearing work overalls, sitting on an overturned crate, reading an afternoon newspaper and swallowing long draughts of cold Suntory beer from a can wrapped in brown paper. Neither police officer expected to make an arrest that day; rather, it was what the senior detective like to call ‘watch and learn.’ The cult was not a fly-by-night operation. They would be around when the time came to make arrests, once the young detective found something to pursue.
Warm afternoon air, pushed around by errant breezes, sat heavy and thick with captured diesel fumes, puffs of greasy restaurant fryer stench, and pungent diner trash yet to be moved. The senior detective sat beyond the smell on a narrow but busy thoroughfare sidewalk with an excellent view of the the cult’s storefront and the junior detective’s conversation with a young, pretty cult devotee. Across the street the senior detective noticed a side door to the cult’s building and guessed that has access to other rooms on the main floor, including a lavatory.
Promising his bladder quick relief, the senior detective strode to the narrow alley and the side door ten beyond the sidewalk. Sure the door would be unlocked, he found the k**b loose, twisted it, eased the door out toward him, and as he peered inside, the total lack of noise aside from the fetching young woman’s chirping for the young detectiv’s benefit encouragd the senior detective to continue his mission.
He ignored the two flimsy doors on his immediate right for one at the end of the hall, crowned with a transome held open with a metal bar. It had the small of a wash room. To the right of the door was an inset tile window made of sqaure frosted panes of thick glass. Hearing nothing, not so much as a whisper or whoosh or drip from a leaking faucet, the senior detective entered the room of relief.
Focusing on his trouser fly and his pending bladder emergency, the senior detective could be forgiven for failing to notice a wire hanging loose from the ceiling of the room. He might even be forgiven for not noticing the person who quietly and quickly entered the room behind him, someone who wore rubber gloves and boots so as not to be electrocuted when handling the wire, or when upon seizing senior detective at the commode, ensured the wire’s current did its best to render the senior detective dead.
If the senior detective had lived, he might have been forgiven for failing to realize the sharp operators at the hall had seen him and the young detective and pegged them being the cops that that they were. A quick search of the senior detective’s pockets proved their instincts.
Forgiveness might have came despite falling victim to one of the more ruthless of the cult’s enforcers, who knew the local police had handed off their investigations to higher authorities and were stepping up their activities after several drug busts brought unwanted attention throughout Tokyo media.
The junior detective never knew he had walked into a trap. The eager young man had dropped his guard and followed the young proselytizer, feminine and fine and charming, into an adjoining room, where he was hooded, bound, beaten, stabbed, and wrapped in bin bags.
Before the afternoon sun fell, the senior detective joined the junior detective, reunited in a Setagaya trash compactor.

And in the midst of a burgeoning battle of cult vs. cops, Shig Sato is visited by an elderly geisha with a request that will unlock more than one mystery for him, and others in his world.

Tuesday, June 9, 1992. Morning.
Ancient hands meant for finer skills than wielding scissors clipped through the newsprint straight and true. The result was a lone photograph with just enough border attractive enough for her scrapbook. It joined several other photographs, some dull and discolored with age, all of them the same subject -- Ses Fujimori.
Her hands unencumbered and steady, after a few dollops of glue and an keen eye for detail, the old woman placed the photograph in its place, then leaned back to admire her work.
It will do, she knew.
Turning the page, a different face appeared before her. Several photographs, one from a gather outside a hall, the caption indicating an underworld funeral, the deceased a young man she never knew.
She never knew him. That didn’t matter to her battered heart.
But the photograph was glued to the stiff page not because of the deceased, but because of the living.
One man in particular.
Shig Sato.
“Are you as good as everyone says you are?” she murmured, almost a supplication. “Will you be able to find my Ai-chan?”

Shig Sato’s morning had, to that point, amounted to breakfast with his housekeeper Chi Hirahara and his nephew Toranosuke Nomura, a resident of three month’s standing in Sato’s home and man-child of 18 who had proved to be the least objectionable of his wife Miki’s family. The boy’s presence had become to Shig a flesh-and-blood reminder of Miki, dead for almost a year, a wound still fresh.
The boy belonged to Miki’s sister, but to his credit, he struck out on his own the first chance he got. That Tora Nomura chose him had at fist flummoxed Sato, but it was Chi who said it plainly: “He needs someone to look up to. He’s decided it’s you.”
So, on a morning like that in June, with Sato sitting on the Marunouchi train hurling toward Akasaka-mitsuke and the office that housed Sato Investigation Service, he contemplated the boy’s desire to help him in his private investigation service. Sato had suggested that Toru continue his education and become a police officer. Since that time, Tora dropped that subject, but he had made himself useful helping Hirahara with the day-to-day business of keeping the house clean and running errands. So far, the lad had been cooperative. Sato was glad to see the boy was a hard worker who didn’t mind being told what to do by Hirahara and, when necessary, Mai Sakamoto, whose presence and assistance pleased both the boy and Hirahara. The boy even passed muster with Sato’s best friend and investigation partner, Ken Abe.
Sato wondered how long that would last.

Upon exiting the subway station Sato followed the directions to his business – three blocks south, turn right, and then another block, where he approached an intersection with a coffee shop at the bottom of a white office building five stories high. At another corner, a bank; another, an electronics equipment sales outlet with garish signs shouting bargains too good to be believed, and at the fourth, a real estate agent’s office with dozens of photos of properties of every type, size and price posted in the windows.
Sato crossed the street to the tall white building and without so much as a glance at his business’s sign he entered the small lobby and walked up the one flight of stairs to his landing and the door that proclaimed Sato Investigation Service. He detected no aroma of coffee nor cigarette smoke so he fished his office keys from his pocket and unlocked the door, and did indeed find the office empty. This was not unusual for 9:20 a.m. on a Tuesday.
Sato took Abe’s absence as a given. Neither ever really relied on the other for the cases that came to the agency. Abe was the manager in that regard, and once a day they met to discuss whatever was relevant. Sato liked the arrangement. He was retired from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department for the crime of getting old. Abe was not so old but quit the department to team up with Sato in the investigation service, established quite on a whim, or more precisely, a promise Sato made to one of the wealthiest men in the country, Kazuo Takahashi. Sato found himself to be a reluctant P.I. before he really knew it. That had been the summer before. If he ever stopped to think of it, which he was not inclined to do, he would have been amazed at himself, normally a thoughtful, careful, thorough man.
But that was then.
Sato crossed the office to adjust and then raise the blinds of the three tall windows that dominated the exterior wall. As he pushed open each one the cacophony of summertime Tokyo filtered in. Just as he was about to turn for his desk he recognized a car pull up to the spot closes to the heavy glass door that led to the lobby below. For a moment he believed he recognized the Lexus, but that thought was derailed by the sight of a woman so elegantly graceful Sato swallowed a breath. From his days with the police department he knew there were geisha in the city. Although he had never been interested in ‘the floating world’ he was man enough to be curious when he saw such a woman, even one without the makeup and accoutrement but nevertheless geisha just the same, no matter what age.
Sato turned to inspect his office, believing to the depths of his soul the woman would enter his office. Before he knew what he was doing he was boiling water for tea and with his handkerchief dusting off the office’s one comfortable chair.
As he stood with his hands on his hips inspecting the room for a third time he heard a mild rap on the door. When he opened it he saw whom he expected: a woman he guessed to be about 80 years of age who appeared many years younger, standing straight and imperious, a woman not to be trifled with, who in that flash of recognition, transformed into someone long experienced in the art of amusement and flattery.
“Oh, Sato-san, you did not have to greet me yourself!” she quietly exclaimed as Sato recited the normal phrases of greeting someone in the morning, returning her bow and guiding her to her chair. Politely refusing the tea he offered, the woman closed her eyes as if collecting her thoughts, then addressed Sato, who had managed by this time to be seated, attentive, and glad he wore one of his better summer shirts, and that the fans were doing their job without blowing air onto his visitor.
Before he realized how ridiculous he sounded, Sato managed to blurt out, “So, you know who I am.”
Raising a hand to hid a smile as she turned her heard as if still an ingenue, the woman only said, “Of course I do. Doesn’t everyone know Sato-san? I am Kubota.”
Sato resisted his initial reply, willing his mind to return to its duty: observe, analyze, deduce. Who was this woman? Was that her real name or her gei-ka name? Why was she here? What could an elderly…
“Who is it you wish to find?” Sato asked, his gaze steady.
The woman belied nothing.
“My daughter,” she said, quietly and firmly.

Inspector Shig Sato has managed to p**s off the top brass. Again. He's being shipped off to VIP protection duty, except... the brass needs his help. Because something about this su***de by overdose just doesn't add up. Tokyo Summer. https://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Summer-Mystery-Novella-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B06XYWWZWL

Tokyo Summer: A Shig Sato Mystery Novella (Shig Sato Mysteries) Tokyo Summer: A Shig Sato Mystery Novella (Shig Sato Mysteries)

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"There is a beauty in risk, and all art is risk. That is where the beauty lies."

Joseph Mark Brewer updated their info in the about section.

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Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. Ancient Proverb

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"Follow the clues. The clues will always tell you what happened and take you where you must go." - Inspector Shig Sato https://buff.ly/3m9fVeR

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