THE LAST TRAIN is the debut Tokyo-based thriller by multi-award-winning author Michael Pronko. In the novel, Detective Hiroshi Shimizu is an investigator of white collar crime in Tokyo. He’s lost his girlfriend and still dreams of his time studying in America, but with a stable job, his own office and a half-empty apartment, he’s settled in. When an American businessman turns up dead, his mentor Takamatsu calls him out to the site of a grisly murder in a train station. A glimpse from a security camera video suggests the killer was a woman, but in Japan, that seems unlikely. Takamatsu drags Hiroshi out to the hostess clubs and skyscraper offices of Tokyo in search of the killer. When Takamatsu inexplicably disappears, Hiroshi teams up with ex-sumo wrestler and detective Sakaguchi. They scour Tokyo’s sacred temples, corporate offices and industrial wastelands to find out where Takamatsu went, and why an average-seeming woman would be driven to murder. The intricate, rigid hierarches of Japan mean that people stay in place, while inside information about real estate—the true currency of Japan, Takamatsu tells Hiroshi before he disappears--travels in a flash from the top investment firms to the bottom of the working world, where street-level punks and teenage hostesses sell their souls for a small cut of lucrative land deals. Hiroshi’s determined to cut through Japan’s ambiguities—and dangers—to find the murdering ex-hostess before she extracts her final revenge—which just might be him.