Sad to say that I had to DNF it half way through. I could not for the life of me get into the story.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for this free e-ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I'm trying to find some positive aspects about #TokyoSwindlers , though I don't know what I was expecting. The thing that I liked the most, probably, was the insights and flashbacks on Takumi's life before becoming a swindler, because they give the reader the opportunity to get to know his reasons on a deeper level. Despite this, it still felt thin. The reason why he becomes a con artist (no spoilers) are not strong enough for me (or maybe not presented properly? One time it seems he does that out of economical desperation, the other time to regain some...uh...dignity, for a lack of better term? Another time I'm lead to think he's doing it to fill the void he has within himself...I don't know, I'm confused. Maybe it doesn't matter.)

Aside from Takumi and Tatsu, the policeman, the other characters are unsufferable. And I don't mean merely unlikable or unrelatable. I wanted them to go die in a fire. I was sorry for Takumi, but other than that, I didn't care for any of them. I'd have appreciated more space for police investigation, in general more light shed on Tatsu, who is a mere tool to the plot and not much else. Ok, I know there's a sequel to this, so maybe he's dedicated more space in the second installment...just maybe.

Finally, the plot felt submerged in a myriad of other details that weren't necessary. The idea at the bottom is valid, but maybe it needed to be developed in another way. Also, I had the feeling that many things were a problem of translation, rather than writing.

I'll see if I can watch the series, perhaps it works better as a screenplay. 🥰

Read this after watching the show, which I really liked. It was a solid book but it felt like some of the pace was missing.

An excellent heist novel - think 'Heat' meets Tokyo Vice. A ruthless gang sets a property swindle, our cynical cop-nearing-retirement tries to catch them. But is deeper than just a generic crime novel, and the characters and their back stories invite the reader deeper into the world of the book than many others. A fascinating insight into the shady underworld of con artists, this is a rewarding and involving read. There is a Netflix adaptation, which I haven't seen yet, but will be checking it out.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

I loved this and it was exactly what I needed. I have been looking for a good thriller and this book was it. The pacing kept me on my toes and trying to figure out which characters I can trust and which I can't was a fun game. It was a great crime thriller and if you are looking for one this is one I can't recommend enough. You will be brought on so many twists and turns that you will get twisted around and think you have it figured out for a curve ball to be thrown yet everything makes sense when it's done.

Rating: 3-3.25/5 ⭐

Review:
✨I just don’t know how to properly articulate my thoughts on this story honestly.
✨There are two land-frauds here, but more focus on the second project.
✨In terms of plot, for me, it is not too fast-paced enough in my opinion. However, there are still moments of suspense here and there, especially around the last third of this story. Most of the scenes have connections to Takumi because he is the MC.
✨This is because the earlier parts are about the first fraud, Takumi’s background story, and the swindler team’s planning for the second project.
✨In terms of characters, I could roughly divide them into five categories: the main team, the accomplices, Takumi’s past, the police and the victims.
✨The main team is the main focus of the story, especially Takumi and Harrison because he is the team leader. Those member’s fate at the end are quite expected by looking at their crimes and how their leader is.
✨The accomplices' fates are relatively unknown besides one person from the first case. I do actually have some pity for him actually, but, somebody wants to cut loose ends.
✨Appearance of characters from Takumi’s past and the police are minor, but they do affect the ending actually.
✨For Aoyaga, I felt he did deserve the ending. There are several red flags that indicate something fishy is happening, but he chooses to ignore them because of his goal.
✨I would say the atmosphere of this story is cold, but there are still some heartwarming parts, such as when Takumi and Nagai meet for the first time.
✨For me, Harrison Yamanaka is the true mastermind of this story, and he is basically a psychopath.
✨For Takumi, I don’t know what to feel about him. But based on the ending, I hope he can find enlightenment.
✨Generally, I have a hard time getting through this story except during the climax and the ending. I’m not sure if this story has a sequel, but if it has a sequel that focuses more on Takumi and the police, I’m interested.
✨I’m not sure when I can watch the Netflix adaptation, but the trailer looks interesting.
✨Thank you to Stone Bridge Press and NetGalley for this ARC! This review was voluntarily written by me.

This crime drama follows the grief-riddled Takumi and straight-shooting Detective Tatsu as they struggle with purpose and legacy in the face of gang affiliation and retirement, respectively. As the story progresses, the two realize they may have a common goal even in their enmity.

CW: murder, sexual harassment, misogyny

While this serves as insight into the prolific nature of land scammers in Japan, a phenomenon relatively unique to the country due to its complex real estate and bureaucratic structure, I found it unfulfilling. The writing style and plot are easy to follow, but the characters remain one-note except our main pair. Outside of Yamanaka, the swindlers felt interchangeable and expendable. Any women represented get a short end of the stick whether we are supposed to like them or not. The misogynistic sightlines combined with skin-crawling sexual depictions were hard to ignore.

I thought Takumi compelling and wish this had dug deeper into his psychological state and conflict with Yamanaka. Ultimately, it lacked a significant emotional or dramatic crux to drive any lasting impression. If you are seeking to expand into Japanese literature, I would start elsewhere.

Thank you to Stone Bridge Press for providing this copy via NetGalley.

Did not enjoy. Translation weak. May be excellent in original Japanese but in English it left me cold.

Real Rating: 3.25* of five

I liked this nasty little exposé of the vilest kind of greed inherent in late-stage capitalism. Netflix thought this was a good story, too. (That's the YouTube trailer.)

I can't get to a fourth star because I have no clue if this is a mystery that's a complete failure, or a handily fictionalized true-crime story so there can be dialogue in place of infodumps. There's drama, but there's no narrative frame to speak of. The "detective" is negligible in word count. The story is, however, as gripping as Of Saints and Miracles .

Stone Bridge Press charges $9.95 for an ebook. Seems like good value, if your expectations are set properly, to me.

3.5

I wasn't at all clear about what this book would be about because I'm very good at skimming blurbs so I'm often surprised by the content.

Tokyo Swindlers is about a group of people who manage to swindle big companies out of billions of yen by pretending they own land that is actually owned by others.

I'm not clear on whether the detective Tatsu has featured in other books by this author but he plays a very minor role in this one. So don't get the idea that it's a book about bad guys getting their comeuppance - far from it.

What we actually get is two instances of how big companies are easily fooled into handing over vast amounts of cash for land that is then found to belong to someone else. Only one of the players - Takumi - seems to show any responsibility or shame for his acts but he joined the gang to expunge the shame he felt that his father had been similarly swindled many years before.

I've got to admit that the amounts involved sound utterly insane. Having bought land in Ireland (3/4 acre for €39,000) it seems ludicrous that a lesser amount of land costs the equivalent of €61,500,000. But land in Tokyo is precious so just bear that in mind when you are reading this.

What baffled me about this book is it's lack of any real direction. We get two similar swindles, we have a few deaths, we have a detective who is retiring and we have possibly the oddest (and most hilarious) sex scene at the end of the book.

I kept reading because I expected an exciting denouement but it was just as average as the rest of the book. Parts were interesting but I would not class this as a detective novel or a thriller. Perhaps its a piece of advice for Japanese city dwellers.

Thankyou to Netgalley for the advance review copy.

It’s a Japanese Oceans 11, except that it’s land transactions rather than casinos and the victims are corporations. The novel is very ambiguous as to who the reader should root for: will the swindlers manage it? Will the buyers twig that something’s up? Will the police catch the swindlers? The scenes I found most touching were those between Takumi and Nagai the reclusive programmer. A short read and something of a cautionary tale of caveat emptor. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

As Tsujimoto Takumi's life falls apart in the wake of the deaths of his wife and son, he drifts from dead end job to dead end job. At one of these jobs, he meets a man by the name of Harrison Yamanaka, who offers to pay Takumi handsomely to run simple errands. It doesn't take a genius to figure out these errands are highly illegal, but the works are not bad, and Takumi doesn't have to work any harder than necessary. Soon after he starts working for Harrison, Harrison offers him to come into his inner circle as a land swindler in Tokyo. Almost as soon as he starts in this dangerous, yet thrilling career, Takumi begins to see the same patterns in his new "job" as those that had lead to his family's death, and he begins to realize that is boss may be far worse than a man just conning some corporations out of billions.

This was a pretty straightforward heist novel. Pretty standard cast of characters for the genre, other than them being a bit older than normal (which was nice), and a predictable plot line pretty much from the minute we find out what lead Takumi's family's death. It was still a fun quick read, though, in the way a story about a bunch of con artists getting away with it can be. Especially since we find out some interesting things about the people they are swindling. The group Harrison puts together are as cold as they get and have zero remorse for what they are doing but I found that I had thanks to the information Harrison has dug up on their targets I didn't feel entirely bad about them getting robbed blind. Especially Aoyagi, dude was a grade A sleazeball and deserved whatever he got for being a moron.

Oh, and Harrison is an absolute psychopath, and while he makes up very little of the story, I think it's really important to keep in mind that he sees something of himself in Takumi.

Overall, I'd recommend this for anyone looking for a fast-paced, crime novel that's more about how low we are willing to sink when we allow our grief to swallow us.

As always, thanks to Stone Bridge Press and Netgalley for the eArc!

I found this to be quite entertaining as well as informative. An unscrupulous gang of Japanese rascals practice land swindles, employing some extremely complicated methods, but the rewards are great. What I found informative was the mathematics involved in determining the value of a piece of real estate in Tokyo currently being used as, say, a parking lot. I must admit to ignorance of the Network series, which I shall look up, and that this is based on fact. But I was entertained throughout.

Coming into this reading experience with the premise on my mind, I was excited for what was in store for me: The male MC is bound by his past and in an attempt to free himself from its clutches, he joins a team of people who commit acts of real estate fraud, bringing in large sums of money. However, something is amiss because no matter how successful these operations are, Takumi still feels an emptiness that threatens to conquer him. On the other hand, we have a retiring detective who's put on a case that he's compelled to solve - even if it means spending less time with his wife - because it'll absolve him of his past. Takumi and the retiring detective share that connection and it's all because of one person.

Now, with that in mind, I am happy to say that this book is fairly decent given its length because a lot happens. I found the storytelling to be quite interesting as it was heavily detailed in terms of setting up how these real estate fraud operations commence. Though confused at times, I also enjoyed the switches in character POVs (it made me feel like I did when I read Murakami's Kafka on the Shore - anticipating the two MCs' meeting). Additionally, despite the typos - which I get are inevitable in works of translation - this story was really well written in that it kept me engaged.

On the other hand, I felt that because this story wasn't told in first person POV, but rather third person omniscient, there was a feeling of detachment that I didn't really appreciate. This didn't help with how affected Takumi was by his past - even though I did feel for him when what happened was revealed. Even so, besides Tatsu (the aforementioned retiring detective), none of the characters were even remotely likable to me. These two things are really my only plights with the story, but overall, I had a fairly good time reading this and I'm excited to watch the Netflix adaptation!

I was really looking forward to this book. I previously watched the Netflix series and was familiar with the original Sekisui Home swindle on which the book was based. I'd read parts of the book in Japanese, and was planning to review the English version for Japonica, the journal of Japanese culture.

Unfortunately, something went wrong with the translation. It is not very good. In fact, it was impossible to finish.

I went back and looked at the Japanese original, and it's decent. The translation, though, suffers from 2 problems. First, the dialogue in the original is written in heavy Osaka dialect. Imagine a mafia novel set in NYC. It's tough to translate. Unfortunately, it gets translated into some kind of weird English slang that doesn't work. Second, it looks like the translation was done quickly. It's correct. Each sentence in the English matches the Japanese sentence. But the nuance isn't there. And the flow is missing. It feels like a first draft. It needed a second draft and a third draft to smooth it out and convert it from a literal line-by-line textbook translation of the Japanese to a readable English novel.

So sadly I have to say, this is not worth picking up.

This is the kind of book that I really do want to love, but I admit to having a lot of trouble getting into it. I see from other reviews that it is a drama and I'm thinking that this may be that rare exception when a story is better on screen than it is on page. However, I appreciate having it and am glad that it is in book form. Enthusiasts will want to immerse in both.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I hope it does well.

I've become a great fan of Japanese crime fiction,both contemporary and "Golden Age", so I was looking forward to reading Tokyo Swindlers by Ko Shinjo.
Sadly while it's a very interesting look into the world of "land sharks" and the shadowy world of land fraud in Japan it's very far from thrilling. Apparently the book has been made into a Netflix story and it reads very much like "the book of the movie", making me wonder if the series or the book came first, and never quite hits the spot. That's a real shame as the plot is good,some of the characters are very interesting but it never gets beyond ,"an ok read" and there's key part that I would have thought was clever if I hadn't already read a very similar scene in the same setting in a Scandinavian detective novel several years ago.
I really wanted to like this, and fully expected to after being spoiled by several excellent Japanese crime novels recently ,but sadly it always promised more than it ultimately delivered.

I decided to pause watching the drama in order to finish the book first and I found that the show really fleshed a lot of things out more. I'm not sure if this is merely a lack of context that the text itself doesn't provide because a large chunk of the Japanese population would already be familiar with certain ideas or if it's an artistic choice, but I did find myself lost at certain points.

Unfortunately I also found it difficult to keep track of most of the characters as they didn't really have unique voices and there were multiple abrupt cuts as if I was reading the drama in novel form instead of a novel that was adapted into a drama. There's definitely a good story in here, but I'm not sure if this is the format for me in regards to this particular story.

At its best, crime fiction books around Japanese culture are a real treat. Sadly, Tokyo Swindlers felt more like a punishment. There is no tension, the characters cannot be differentiated and any plot is indistinguishable amid such an anaemic narrative. I learnt a little about Tokyo real estate but was hoping for so much more from this offering.