A Cop's Eyes [Hardcover]

The horror, of seemingly ordinary people doing horrifying things, can take the eyes of just as seemingly ordinary people to see.

Tall, soft-spoken Natsume used to work with troubled kids at a reformatory but resigned mid-career to become a police detective. Those who’ve known him wonder why the gentlest of men, whose vocation had been to have faith in humans, now doubts them professionally. The truths of his path unfold over seven carefully crafted chapters, each of which stands on its own as a short story with the power to move and delight the most seasoned reader.

Determination, not vengeance, animates A Cop’s Eyes, its focus neither well-placed punches, nor even stunning feats of forensics, but the stubbornly interpersonal dimension of detective work. An anti-hero in a wholly different vein from noir protagonists, the ying to Dirty Harry’s yang, Natsume will endear himself to fans of understated Robert Parker goodness and the late Peter Falk’s Lt. Columbo.“A COP’S EYESby Gaku Yakumaru is a book for those who like something a bit different in their crime fiction…. IfA COP’S EYESfits into a genre slot, it is police procedural in that it follows the work of detective Natsume, a quiet, gentle man who moved into policing after working in a reformatory for troubled children. But here any link to the traditional police procedural ends…. Natsume believes in justice and the law, but this is a justice tempered with a very human mercy and understanding…. There is an air of fable about the stories as Yakumaru sets up the situation, introduces us to the players and then to the crime, before Natsume’s ‘cop’s eyes’ observe the situation. He is sometimes cast almost in a minor role, but his are the eyes, the ones that can see the whole picture, and set the crime in its context. He is the one who can, finally, reveal the killer.”
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