The Makoto Murders

A pitch-black, Dexter-esque thriller from the winner of the Crime Writers' Association's 2024 Debut Dagger: a paparazzo in Tokyo commits murders to stage the photographs his sensation-hungry magazine audience demands. A razor-sharp satire of our darkest fantasies and obsession with true crime – for fans of Bella Mackie's How to Kill Your Family, Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, The Serial Killer, and the HBO crime series Tokyo Vice.

Ken Kato, half British, half Japanese, works as a photojournalist for a tabloid weekly in Tokyo. He became famous through a photo of a boy who drowned in the 2011 tsunami – a child he might have saved if he hadn't waited for the perfect light. Four years later, with no new success and the threat of losing his job, Kato decides to become a serial killer himself to deliver his own sensational shots – and so is always the first to arrive at the scene. The images cause a sensation in a society where murder is rare, and send circulation soaring.

To impress the estranged wife of his colleague Hayashi, Makoto – whom he stalks after a brief affair – Kato kills only men and women with the same name. The police grow suspicious but find no evidence, since Kato plans meticulously. His chief editor too suspects the truth but ignores it as long as sales boom.

The Makoto Murders is a darkly satirical novel about ambition, media cynicism, and our morbid fascination with charismatic serial killers. The novel poses uncomfortable questions – without forgetting to be, above all, one thing: a breathless page-turner.