Murder Walk

The girls walk for money... He walks for the killIn Osaka’s neon-soaked Shinsekai district, men pay to walk the streets with girls dressed as high schoolers-a compensated 'date' that’s prostitution in every way but name. It’s supposed to end with cash changing hands. For one girl, it ends in a cheap hotel room, strangled, with a killer’s cryptic mark carved into her palm.Private investigator Kyoko Nakamura is still riding the wave of notoriety from proving the Akane Suzuki case was murder, not suicide-a win that embarrassed the Osaka Prefectural Police and made her exactly as popular with them as you’d expect. So when Yukari Fukuda, who runs a shelter for runaway girls, comes to Kyoko convinced the police won’t lift a finger for another dead 'JK' girl, Kyoko can’t say no. Not when the victim could have been any of the girls Yukari’s spent her life trying to save.Getting looped into the investigation puts Kyoko against a rising star in the police department who has more ambition than instinct, and would love nothing more than to watch Kyoko fail in public. It also means leaning on her old mentor and the fraying trust between them. And Kyoko must enter places no badge can get her-into the shadows of Shinsekai, where runaways and working girls know better than to talk to cops, but might just talk to her.But as the body count rises and the killer’s marks grow bolder, Kyoko realizes this isn’t a crime of opportunity. Someone is hunting girls that the world already stopped protecting-methodically, deliberately, and with a message he’s daring someone to decode before he strikes again.Murder Walk is the pulse-pounding second entry in the Nakamura Detective Agency series. Take a hardboiled dive into Osaka’s red-light underworld where justice is scarce, respectability is a luxury few victims are afforded, and Kyoko Nakamura is the only one still willing to look. From Percival Constantine, author of the Luther Cross series.