Description

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

A pitch-black, Dexter-like thriller from the winner of the 2024 Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger, in which a Tokyo paparazzo commits murders in order to generate the photos his magazine’s readership ghoulishly demands. A razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies and obsession with true crime for fans of Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s 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 he’s 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 Hayashi’s 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. Kato’s 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 they’re good-looking and charismatic), The Makoto Murders asks plenty of uncomfortable questions of the reader while never forgetting it’s first and foremost a page-turning thriller.

Publisher Review

“Provocative…Jerram’s nihilistic tale takes a page from Bret Easton Ellis in its blackly comic portrait of an unrepentant killer. The darkness can be suffocating, but readers who’ve acquired a taste for such bad behavior should enjoy themselves.”
Publishers Weekly

“I read The Makoto Murders in one sitting. As unsettling as it is addictive, it takes a genuinely original idea and executes it with real nerve and precision, turning murder into something far more disturbing than violence alone. An exploration of art, ambition and moral collapse, this is crime fiction with real bite behind the craft. A debut that lingers long after the final page.”
Amanda Lees

“The Makoto Murders is a dark satire on our ongoing obsession with true crime and a fascinating insight into Japanese life. In Ken Kato, Richard Jerram has created a truly disturbing individual, all the more unnerving for the chilling calm with which he undertakes a series of murders motivated solely by self-interest. I can’t wait to see what Jerram does next!”
Bridget Walsh

“A stylish interrogation of contemporary obsessions, and with a deeply etched sense of place, The Makoto Murders is unsettling and outrageous, fast-paced and very entertaining.”
Joe Thomas