Six Four

Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four begins with an abduction in 1989 Tokyo: a 7-year-old school girl, the daughter of a local pickle business owner, is kidnapped and then found dead after the abductor’s ransom demands are not met. The case came to be known as Six Four, and remained unsolved for 14 years. That is until Yoshinobu Mikami, the investigator who worked the case—now a demoted press director for the police department—finds his own daughter Ayumi has gone missing. With new insights into the grief of a parent with a missing child, Mikami revisits the cold case and finds a previously overlooked detail that he takes to the family on the anniversary of their daughter’s disappearance. The 2012 book was Yokoyama’s sixth novel, but the first to be translated into English, by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, in 2016. It secured best-seller status in Japan and went on to top the 2013 Kono Mystery ga Sugoi! (This Mystery is Excellent!) mystery fiction guide. —Armani Syed

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