The Makoto Murders

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. Ken Kato is a half-British, half-Japanese photojournalist working for a low-brow weekly magazine in Tokyo who shot to fame with a photograph of a drowning boy during Japan's 2011 tsunami. Could Ken have saved the boy had he not focussed on the lighting and composition? Well, maybe. But the shot was perfect. Four years later, he has failed to repeat that first success. Facing irrelevancy (and, worse, redundancy), Kato finds an ingenious solution: he turns serial killer to generate his own attention-grabbing pictures, causing a sensation in a society where murder is almost unheard of, and tripling the magazine's sales. Hoping to impress his colleague's estranged wife, with whom he's obsessed, Kato sets out to murder only people with the same name as her: Makoto. Suspicion soon begins to swirl - but with the police always a step behind, and sales booming, neither Kato nor his editor sees a reason to end his picture-perfect spree... Get ready to feel uncomfortable with this page-turning satire of ambition, obsession, and our cultural fascination with serial killers.