If you like creepy, well-developed, fun to love/hate characters and a great plot about various competing groups of apparent sociopaths, this is the book for you. I don’t know what it says about me, but I loved, Hotel Lucky Seven, which I read in audio. Unfortunately, it is the fourth and apparently final book in Kotaro Isaka’s “Assassins” series, but it is an easy book to read as a stand alone. I have acquired Book 1 to see if it is worth reading the first three. Usually, if characters are unlikeable, I don’t like a book. But some evil characters are fun to read about even though they have few or no redeeming qualities. It helps when some of them get their comeuppance. There is a moral code in this book although you have to look for it.
So, I’m just going to list some things about the characters, all of whom have funny code names. The story’s arc is about a young woman who cannot forget anything she has ever seen or heard. She has been used by a kind of puppet master who oversees a number of criminal enterprises. He has suggested he might need to do away with her when she has served his needs. She will know too many of his deepest secrets due to her memory. The girl with the memory is running off and decides to stay in this hotel, rumored to be a hotel where nobody dies.
The puppet master character weaves through the book as a player in politics and a successful businessman in noncriminal enterprises, as well as a crime boss. Two of his “employees” who never seem to get paid, are young women who clean hotel rooms as a cover for more sinister work. They met as school girls. Then, we have “The Six” who are a gang of gorgeous looking criminals with a particular task involving the girl with the memory. They are known for using unique weapons very effectively in well-coordinated attacks. We have a famous ex-politician who lives quite well and is always seen with his sidekick bodyguard. He lost his wife and child to a devastating accident. He then made national news when his bodyguard and he took down a crazed man with a knife in front of a lot of school children on public transit, thus rocketing to even more fame for his bravery. He is out of politics, but still powerful and beloved.
Two interesting female criminals play important roles. One, is an older former female criminal who is a computer whiz and sets out to help the girl with the great memory. There is an older current female gang leader who has given one of her employees a task that, as usual for him, goes wrong and turns into one huge mess. This employee plays a large part in everything that goes wrong in what was set up as a well-thought out plan he knows nothing about. There is the porter in the hotel who uses bad judgment. There are a couple of bodyguards meant to help the girl with the memory and the older former female criminal who never show up for the job but ultimately have roles to play. And so forth. There are some gruesome deaths and near misses. These are, after all, sociopathic people.
After listening to this intricate but not hard to follow plot with all these characters whose natures make them easy to remember– honest– there is a quite satisfactory conclusion. I hope reading the first three entries in this series will be just as satisfying. Also, the narrator, Pun Bandhu, is fabulous!
They Called me Bookworm 