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The mysterious East
Suspense novels from far far away REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY Armchair and real-life travelers alike will thrill to these three new mysteries. All have the allure of the Orient, coupled with authentic details that bring their cultures to life for mystery readers.
By Colin Cotterill Soho, $24 256 pages, ISBN 9781569474853 
Real Japanese women
Tokyo is said to be the safest city in the world, although if the events in Natsuo Kirino's chilling Real World are any indication, the safety may be something of an illusion, a thin gauze veil over a maelstrom. Four teenage girls are the protagonists, although some are definitely more pro- than others: Toshi, the steady one, who hears the loud noise next door, unaware that a murder has just taken place; Kirarin, the sweet and lovable one who is a bundle of contradictions just below the surface; Yuzan, the one who has not quite come out of the closet, although her friends are all aware of her sexual leanings; and Terauchi, the hyper-philosophical one who struggles with loneliness and betrayal. All of them have a peculiar bond with a geeky high school kid nicknamed Worm, and each of them will have a fateful interaction with him: two will die, and two will find the courses of their lives irreparably altered. Real World is not about central-casting Japanese girls who shyly cover their mouths when they smile, but rather about thoroughly serious contemporary young women faced with a crisis well beyond their limited abilities to cope with it.
By Natsuo Kirino Knopf, $22.95 224 pages, ISBN 9780307267573
You have to love it when a debut novel is a classic; it's rare enough, to be sure. C.J. Box's Open Season was one, so was John Burdett's Bangkok 8. Both were set far afield of the standard Los Angeles / New York / London locales. Both featured a leading character who was at once charismatic and unkillable, thus setting up the promise of a sequel or a series. The latest addition to these ranks is the irrepressible Inspector Nergui, who plies his trade in the wintry streets of Ulan Bataar, Mongolia (of all places) in Michael Walters' The Shadow Walker. Nergui is joined by his former protégé, Doripalam, and English cop Drew Macleish in an attempt to bring to justice Mongolia's first serial killer. Until recently "the land untouched by time," Mongolia is rapidly modernizing; not unexpectedly, not all of the changes are for the better. The timeworn nomadic way of life is virtually a relic nowadays, and the crime rate has risen exponentially. More importantly, the nature of crime has become aggressively Western in its scope: business cons, land scams and even murder. And now, multiple murders. The three crime fighters have their hands full, both in sifting through the scant evidence and in dealing with the mounting pressure from the Justice Minister to bring the case to a close. When Macleish seemingly drops off the face of the earth after an embassy gathering, the intensity ratchets up, threatening to escalate into a full-blown international incident. The Shadow Walker is an edge-of-the-seat page-turner, well-plotted and thoroughly, agreeably alien in every respect.
By Michael Walters Berkley Prime Crime, $14 352 pages, ISBN 9780425222331 Bruce Tierney divides his time between Japan and Prince Edward Island.
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Fans of the charmingly eccentric mysteries of Alexander McCall Smith, listen up: Colin Cotterill should be on your shortlist of must-read authors, with his fourth entry into the Dr. Siri series, Curse of the Pogo Stick. Set in Vientiane in the late 1970s, Cotterill's novels chronicle the adventures of Laos' first medical examiner. The elderly Dr. Siri Paiboun is a man of science by most measures, but of late he has found himself to be reluctant corporeal host to the spirit of Yeh Ming, a renowned and somewhat mischievous thousand-odd-year-old shaman. On leave from a stultifyingly boring symposium in Xiang Khouang, Siri finds himself kidnapped by a band of comely female Hmong warriors (some guys have all the luck!). It seems that they have decided to avail themselves of the legendary powers of Yeh Ming to lift a curse on a young tribal woman they believe has been victimized by the malevolent intentions of a pogo stick (despite the fact that this sounds a bit far-fetched as a premise, it makes perfect sense on the printed page). Meanwhile, on the home front, a corpse has shown up at the ME's office, booby-trapped to explode upon the first incision by the coroner. An attempt on Siri's life? It seems likely, but who, and why? Clever, graceful and atmospheric, The Curse of the Pogo Stick is a delightfully different sort of mystery, a pleasure on every level.
A classic debut