Richard Jerram

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The Makoto Murders

A pitch-black, Dexter-like comic thriller in which a Tokyo paparazzo murders in order to generate the photos his magazine's readership ghoulishly demands. A razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies and obsession with true crime for fans of Bella Mackie's How to Kill Your Family.

A pitch-black, Dexter-like comic thriller in which a Tokyo paparazzo murders in order to generate the photos his magazine's readership ghoulishly demands. A razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies and obsession with true crime for fans of Bella Mackie's How to Kill Your Family and Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, The Serial Killer.

Ken Kato is a half-British, half-Japanese photojournalist working for a low-brow weekly magazine in Tokyo. He achieved fame by taking a photograph of a boy who drowned in the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, who he could have saved had he not been more concerned with getting the right light and composition for his shot.

Four years later, he has failed to repeat that success and, facing irrelevancy (and, worse, redundancy), he decides to turn serial killer to generate his own attention-grabbing pictures - for which he's inevitably always first on the scene. His magazine then publishes the pictures, causing a sensation in a society where murder is almost unheard of, and tripling its sales figures.

Hoping to impress his colleague Hayashi's estranged wife Makoto, who he is stalking after a short affair (though she clearly sees things a little differently), Kato murders only men and women with the same name as her. Inevitably the police are suspicious of him, but can find no evidence as he is meticulous in his planning and execution. Kato's editor is also suspicious, but is willing to ignore the evidence in front of him as sales boom.

A pitch-dark satire on our ghoulish obsession with true crime and our fascination with morally repellent serial killers (especially if they're good-looking and charismatic), The Makoto Murders asks plenty of uncomfortable questions of the reader while never forgetting it's first and foremost a page-turning thriller.