A review by ericgaryanderson
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

4.0

I found SIX FOUR compelling. One of his blurbers describes Yokoyama as a Japanese James Ellroy, which I can sort of see, but ultimately Yokoyama is less raunchy and (though this is a risky thing to say given that I'm reading an English translation) less frisky with language than Ellroy. What you get here is a very deeply layered procedural: past and present crimes converge as various offices within the police department come into conflict and various bureaucrats and detectives pursue various schemes, not all of which are overt and readily apparent, so that there's LOTS here about tensions between the press and the police department's media relations office, for example, and lots here about your protagonist swimming, as they say, upstream against various currents. One caution: this novel has a big cast of characters, many of whom have similar-sounding names beginning with M. It takes a bit of a concentrated effort to pick the story back up when you go back into the book after stepping away from it for a spell. But I thought the narrative gathered plenty of momentum and it kept me interested.