Authors: Sujata Massey.
Hardcover, 173 pages
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Publication Date: 2008-06-19


Reviews :

    A Rei Shimura Mystery - During a family reunion on the island of Oahu, Japanese-American undercover spy Rei Shimura is roped into helping the Hawaiian branch of her family regain land stolen from them during World War II. But when fire sweeps the island and her young cousin is accused of arson, Rei, with the assistance of both her boyfriend and ex-lover, must discover the truth, which turns out to be linked to the Shimura family history . . ....

Authors: Sujata Massey.
Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Publication Date: 2007-11-01


Reviews :

   

Chronically underemployed Japanese-American sleuth Rei Shimura has taken a freelance gig with a Washington, D.C., alphabet agency that just might have ties to the CIA. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, is to go undercover as a clerk in a big Tokyo department store. It's a risky assignment, but it also gives Rei a store discount that allows her to freely indulge her shopaholic tendencies.

Meanwhile, she's listening in on private conversations, crashing a conference, and fending off the unwanted advances of a couple of the store's executives who seem fascinated by her navel ring. When her cover is blown, Rei is in big trouble. Suddenly she's neck-deep in something very nasty, and it will take all her resourcefulness and unorthodox methods to survive a determined killer.

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Authors: Sujata Massey.
Mass Market Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: HarperTorch
Publication Date: 2000-04


Reviews :

   

Japanese-American Rei Shimura is a 27-year-old English teacher living in one of Tokyo's seediest neighborhoods. She doesn't make much money, but she wouldn't go back home to California even if she had a free ticket (which, thanks to her parents, she does.) Her independence is threatened however, when a getaway to an ancient castle town is marred by murder.

Rei is the first to find the beautiful wife of a high-powered businessman, dead in the snow. Taking charge, as usual, Rei searches for clues by crashing a funeral, posing as a bar-girl, and somehow ending up pursued by police and paparazzi alike. In the meantime, she manages to piece together a strange, ever-changing puzzle—one that is built on lies and held together by years of sex and deception.

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    The Salaryman's Wife is proof that arts grants do occasionally produce good art. Sujata Massey taught English in Japan and worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. She applied for and won the Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, which allowed her to finish this beautifully crafted story of cross-cultural suspense.

Rei Shimura is a 27-year-old Japanese American English teacher, living precariously on her tiny paycheck in Tokyo, the most expensive city in the world. She's determined not to use the plane ticket back to California offered by her parents. On a visit to the ancient castle town of Shiroyama, brought to such rich life that you'll want to head there instantly, Rei gets involved in a local murder. Her probing angers the conservative police and most of the citizens, but Rei persists, in spite of threats to her life and freedom. Her character is so well conceived and her adventures so believable that readers across the world should identify with Rei--and hope for a second serving soon. ...

Authors: Sujata Massey.
Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Publication Date: 2005-12-01


Reviews :

   

Life in modern Tokyo is a blast for Rei Shimura, a young Japanese-American woman who enjoys busy days as an antiques dealer and steamy nights with a devoted new boyfriend. But things come to a standstill when Rei overpays for a rare old chest of drawers for a wealthy client, the owner of a famous Zen temple in Kamakura. The exquisite tansu turns out to be a fake: the worst deal Rei has ever made. When the temple family turns on Rei -- and the con man who sold the tansu is murdered -- she realizes she's opened a Pandora's box of deception and murder. A young martial artist, an aspiring rock singer, and an elderly antiques mentor all become part of Rei's search for the killer through the shadows of an ancient culture. As her world begins to rapidly and inexplicably unravel, Rei realizes that it will take strength, wit, and a Zen attitude to survive.

...

Authors: Sujata Massey.
Mass Market Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Avon
Publication Date: 2002-10-01


Reviews :

   

Antiques dealer Rei Shimura has managed to snag one of the most lucrative and prestigious jobs of her career: a renowned museum in Washington, D.C., has invited her to exhibit rar kimonos and give a lecture on them. Accompanied by a gaggle of Japanese office ladies bent on a week of shopping, Rei lands in the capital. But her big break could ultimately break her. Within hours one of the kimonos is stolen, and then Rei's passport is discovered in a shopping mall dumpster -- on the dead body of one of the Japanese tourists. Trouble is only beginning, though, for now Rei's parents have arrived and so has her ex-boyfriend. To track down the kimono and unmask a killer, Rei's got to do some clever juggling, fast talking, and quick sleuthing, or this trip home could be her last.

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    Sujata Massey's lively bicultural series featuring Rei Shimura, the Tokyo antique dealer who can't seem to keep out of trouble, brings her heroine back to her American roots in this engaging tale of corruption and chicanery in the museum exhibition game. Rei is unexpectedly invited to accompany a treasure trove of antique kimonos to a Washington, D.C., museum and to deliver a couple of lectures on the cultural history of the gorgeous garments. A last-minute decision to substitute a priceless wedding kimono for one that's too fragile to travel sets in motion a chain of events that lands Rei in serious peril.

When Rei's former boyfriend, Scottish attorney Hugh Glendinning, turns up at the Washington museum, she's caught up in a romantic crisis, having just settled into a new relationship with Takeo Kayama, the Japanese playboy she met two books ago (in The Flower Master). But that dilemma is soon eclipsed by the theft of the wedding kimono, which was uninsured, and by the disappearance of Rei's seatmate on the flight from Japan. When the seatmate's dead body and Rei's passport and tickets turn up in a Washington dumpster, Rei is suspected of murder, larceny, and even prostitution. Through all this, Massey does a nice job of imparting a wealth of fascinating information on the kimono tradition.

Rei gets more appealing with every outing, and in this one Massey ratchets up the romantic tension and action--maybe because Rei's in a country that's more obsessed with sex than with tradition. Nicely plotted, well characterized, and carefully crafted, this may be Massey's best yet. --Jane Adams...

Authors: Sujata Massey.
Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Publication Date: 2006-09-01


Reviews :

   

A young woman with a foothold in two cultures, Rei Shimura has gone wherever fortune and her unruly passions have led her throughout her chaotic twenties. Now, after the streamers for her thirtieth birthday celebration have been taken down, the Japanese-American antiques dealer and part-time sleuth finds herself with an assignment to find and authenticate an ancient Middle Eastern pitcher that disappeared from Iraq's national museum.

The piece is believed to be in the hands of a wealthy Japanese collector, whose passion for beauty extends to Rei herself. But when a devastating typhoon hits Tokyo, Rei is trapped with the object of her investigation—and with much much more than the fate of an ancient pitcher at risk.

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Authors: Sujata Massey.
Mass Market Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Avon
Publication Date: 2001-07-01


Reviews :

   

Half-American, half-Japanese, Rei Shimura is finally beginningto feel like Tokyo is home. Now a writer on art and antiques at the Gaijin Times, a comic-style magazine aimed at affluent young readers, Rei's latest assignment is a piece on the history of comic book art. During a weekend of research and relaxation at her boyfriend Takeo's beachside house, Rei stumbles upon the perfect subject: an exquisite modern comic that reveals the disturbing social milieu of pre-World War II Japan.

Rei art story, evolves into something much darker. One of the comic's young creators is found dead -- a murder that soon takes the tenacious Rei deep into the heart of Japan's youth underground. Immersed in the investigation, she finds herself floating through strip clubs, animation shops, and coffeehouses to get the true story -- and save her own skin....

Authors: Sujata Massey.
Mass Market Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: HarperTorch
Publication Date: 2000-04


Reviews :

    Life in Japan for a transplanted California with a fledging antiques business and a nonexistent love life isn't always fun, but when the flower arranging class Rei Shimura's aunt cajoles her into taking turns into a stage for murder, Rei finds plenty of excitement she's been missing. Unfortunately too many people have a reason for committing the crime--her aunt included. While struggling to adjust to the nuances of Japanese propriety, trying to keep her business afloat, and dealing with veiled massages left under her door, Rei sifts the bones of old skeletons to keep her family name clear--and her own life safe from an enemy with a mysterious agenda. If Rei doesn't want to be crushed like fallen cherry blossoms, she's going to have to walk a perilous line and uncover the killer with a dramatic flare for deadly arrangements....

    Rei Shimura, a twentysomething Japanese American antiques dealer, returns for a third outing in Sujata Massey's series set in Japan (Zen Attitude, The Salaryman's Wife). In The Flower Master, Rei's former boyfriend has left Japan, and her antiques business is only slightly more successful than her love life. Then she's dragooned by her aunt Norie into enrolling at a famous Tokyo ikebana school. Rei's not a natural at the ancient art of flower arranging, but she has a talent for sleuthing, which comes in handy when the head teacher at the Kayama School is found dead--with a pair of flower shears exactly like the ones Norie gave her lodged in her neck.

Rei's efforts to find the killer and unravel the secrets entwining her Tokyo family with the Kayamas move the action along, but the real mystery is whether the budding romance between the California girl who can't quite find her place in the tradition-bound society of modern Japan and the handsome environmental activist slated to take over as iemoto (headmaster) of the school will flower into lasting love. Intrigue and multiple murders spice the romance, along with a fascinating explication of ikebana's enduring history. Rei is a lively protagonist who brings the reader along for an entertaining and subtle lesson in Japanese culture as well as in the dangers involved in digging up buried family skeletons. --Jane Adams ...

Authors: Sujata Massey.
Hardcover, 352 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication Date: 2004-08-01


Reviews :

    A dazzling engagement ring and the promise of a fresh start in a new country bring antiques dealer and sometime-sleuth Rei Shimura to Washington, D.C. But while she tries to play catch-up with her beautiful, politically connected cousin, Kendall, and is commissioned to furnish a chic Japanese-fusion restaurant, things start to go haywire. First, Kendall vanishes from the restaurant's opening-night party, and then Rei is drafted to help Andrea, the restaurant's elegant, cagey hostess, investigate the disappearance of her own Japanese mother thirty years earlier.

As the strands of these puzzles begin to come together, Rei finds that her relationship with her fianc#233;, Hugh, has changed from sizzle to burn. At the same time, she faces troubling questions about what it means to be a loving mother -- and whether her own independent streak will endanger the women to whom she has grown close.

Rei must research the scary old days of the Vietnam War and delve into the secret history of an ambitious presidential candidate to piece together the mystery of the vanished women -- and also understand truths about herself, which may change her destiny.

In The Pearl Diver, Sujata Massey delivers a multilayered, suspenseful story complete with the intrigue, romance, and rich Asian cultural background that her fans have come to relish....

Authors: Sujata Massey.
Hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication Date: 2003-03-01
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    Antiques dealer Rei Shimura is in San Francisco visiting her parents and researching a personal project to trace the story of 100 years of Japanese decorative arts through her own family's history. But Rei's work is interrupted by the arrival of her long-distance boyfriend, lawyer Hugh Glendinning, who is involved in a class action lawsuit on behalf of people forced to engage in slave labor for Japanese companies during World War II.

Suddenly, when one of Hugh's clients is murdered, their two projects intertwine. Before long, Rei uncovers troubling facts about her own family's actions during the war. As she starts to unravel the truth and search for a killer, the notions of family ties and loyalty take on an entirely new meaning.

Sujata Massey, whom critics consistently praise for her ability to balance murder and mystery with captivating cultural lore, is back with another gripping and provocative tale sure to keep readers charmed from start to finish.

...