Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2016
224 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
Available for the first time in English, this stellar psychological thriller from Matsumoto follows a man as he investigates why his wife - who has a heart condition - died from over-exertion climbing a steep hill far from home...
While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn't totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly-spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wife - who was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetings - ended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighborhood?
When Tsuneo goes to apologize to the boutique owner for the trouble caused by his wife's death he discovers the villa Tachibana near by, a house known to be a meeting place for secret lovers. As he digs deeper into his wife's recent past, he must eventually conclude that she led a double life...
"Starred Review. His pursuit of the truth becomes all-consuming, building to a surprising and immensely satisfying resolution that flows naturally from the book's complex characterizations." - Publishers Weekly
This information about A Quiet Place was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Seicho Matsumoto: Seicho Matsumoto (1909–1992) did not see his first book published until he was in his forties. He was a prolific author, producing in four decades more than 450 works. He is considered Japan's most accomplished writer of mystery and detective fiction.
Matsumoto's first full-length detective fiction, Ten to sen ('Points and Lines'), after running as a newspaper serial from 1957 to 1958, was a big hit as a book in 1958, selling over a million and a quarter copies. In 1961, Suna do utsuwa ('Vessel of Sand', 1961, published in English as Inspector Imanishi Investigates, 1989) sold four and a half million copies and became a movie box-office hit. 'A Quiet Place' was originally published in Japan in 1971 as Kikanakatta basho. This is the first time it has been translated into English. It was written about half way through Matsumoto's writing life.
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