The Makoto Murders

A pitch-black, Dexter-like thriller from the winner of the 2024 Crime Writers Associations Debut Dagger, in which a Tokyo paparazzo commits murders in order to generate the photos his magazines readership ghoulishly demands. A razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies and obsession with true crime for fans of Bella Mackies How to Kill Your Family and Oyinkan Braithwaites My Sister, The Serial Killer.

A pitch-black, Dexter-like thriller from the winner of the 2024 Crime Writers Associations Debut Dagger, in which a Tokyo paparazzo commits murders in order to generate the photos his magazines readership ghoulishly demands. A razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies and obsession with true crime for fans of Bella Mackies How to Kill Your Family and Oyinkan Braithwaites My Sister, The Serial Killer.

Ken Kato is a half-British, half-Japanese photojournalist working for a low-brow weekly magazine in Tokyo. He achieved fame with a photograph of a boy who drowned in the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, who he could have saved had he not been more concerned with finding the right light and composition for his shot.

Four years later, he has failed to repeat that success and, facing irrelevancy (and, worse, redundancy), he decides to turn serial killer to generate his own attention-grabbing pictures – for which hes inevitably always first on the scene. His magazine then publishes the pictures, causing a sensation in a society where murder is almost unheard of, and tripling its sales figures.

Hoping to impress his colleague Hayashis estranged wife Makoto, who he is stalking after a short affair (though she clearly sees things differently), Kato murders only men and women with the same name as her. Inevitably the police are suspicious, but can find no evidence as he is meticulous in his planning and execution. Katos editor is also suspicious, but is willing to ignore the evidence in front of him as sales boom.

A pitch-dark satire on where ambition will take us, as well as our ghoulish obsession with true crime and our fascination with morally repellent serial killers (especially if theyre good-looking and charismatic), The Makoto Murders asks plenty of uncomfortable questions of the reader while never forgetting its first and foremost a page-turning thriller.