A hostess. A waitress. A journalist. A ride-share driver.
Four women, pulled from the Sumida River in two weeks. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police call it a suicide cluster. Emily Watson knows better — and someone knew exactly when her flight touched down.
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Her mother told her one lie, and told it for twenty-two years: your father is dead.
In 2001, Amy Rowan ran from Tokyo eight weeks pregnant — from the man she loved and the violence wrapped around him. She raised Emily an ocean away and let the lie harden into fact. It was never true.
Jack Turner is alive — an Englishman the underworld calls the White Dragon. And now Emily has come to find him: twenty-two, a journalist, carrying her mother’s photographs and her mother’s secret.
He has no idea she’s his daughter. She knows exactly who he is. Then Jack learns the truth. And the violence Amy crossed an ocean to escape has been waiting twenty-two years for them both to come home.
Also available in Portuguese — O Pai Que Nunca Conheci →
Four women, pulled from the Sumida River in two weeks. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police call it a suicide cluster. Reina Kubo — chain-smoking veteran reporter, last person to speak to one of the dead — knows better. So she calls the one journalist with the scar tissue, the credentials, and the rage to dig: Emily Watson, two years out from the story that won her a Pulitzer and almost killed her.
Within forty-eight hours of landing, Emily has a barbiturate signature linking every victim, a hostess-club ledger thick with diplomatic cash, and a hand-delivered calling card from someone who knew exactly when her flight touched down.
The men killing women in this city don’t leave bodies. They make people vanish. The four women in the river were the ones they meant to find.
I spent nine years learning how people die. I know what patience looks like at a bedside. I married a patient man.
Mark planned everything: the wedding, the money, the honeymoon cabin at the end of a road so remote the phone dies an hour before you arrive. It’s perfect. He’s perfect. The tapping at our window is only a branch, he tells me — and no branch grows within thirty feet of the glass.
Under the floor of the tool shed, I found a diary. It belonged to the last wife who honeymooned here. Her husband was gentle, too. She was happy on the first page and frightened by the third.
They say she went out walking in the weather.
I’ve stopped telling my husband what I find.
Wow. This book had me hooked from the very first page.”
Ann — GoodreadsEverything I never knew I needed in a crime thriller.”
Samantha — GoodreadsThrill ride, no brakes the whole way through.”
Josie — GoodreadsHad me hanging on every single word. Just when I thought I knew where it was going, it completely surprised me.”
Jennifer — Goodreads
Pine Hollow — a psychological thriller. You never know what’s lying in the dark…
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I’m the author of My Father the Yakuza, published by Kurohana Books and translated into Portuguese and Spanish. Before turning to fiction, I built a career in civil engineering and later in the audiovisual world — working across film, television, and advertising on projects around the globe. Somewhere between structure and story, I became more interested in what breaks people than in what holds them together.
My writing blends cinematic precision with a raw, visual sensibility — drawn to the psychology of identity and the quiet violence of choice, the moment a person crosses a line and the silence that follows. My favourite film is Se7en. I’m obsessive about coffee — usually a Kenyan espresso, or a V60 Geisha from Peru when I have time to slow down.
Four Women in the River, the second novel in the Emily Watson Series, arrives 18 August 2026 — and I’m already deep in Hana, James, Cora, the third, coming December 2026. Same world, deeper consequences — the reader caught between the legacy of blood and the burden of truth.
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