A Clean Kill in Tokyo

John Rain is an assassin for hire…

John has three rules:

1. No women or children
2. No second assassin or team, i.e. no competition to muck up his work
3. Will only kill the principal, no killing for intimidation purposes

We start with John killing a high/mid-level politician. During the assassination a bystander takes an unusual amount of interest in the dead person, which John notes. Later John is unwinding at a local Jazz club, where coincidentally the musician is the daughter of the politician he just killed, the bystander appears again and talks to the daughter. Believing his broker has violated one of his rules he starts to investigate the bystander. As part of that investigation he has more interaction with the daughter, which leads them to become romantically involved. John's job then morphs from assassinating people to trying to prevent the assassination of a person, the daughter.

The good point is that John is a believable character, no special super-secret training that has turned him into a killing machine. Barry Eisler provides a reasonable amount of back story on John’s military career and childhood, so you understand how John can mentally be an assassin. However, there isn’t much back story on how John transitioned the skill set of killing someone with a rifle to a pacemaker.

The story progresses well from initial assassination through protecting the daughter. Unfortunately, for me, Barry includes a lot of descriptions of streets, hotels, restaurants, and sections of Tokyo. While I understand the desire to build the atmosphere, this along with the periodic dialog in Japanese just became words I skipped over, having never been to Tokyo nor am I ever planning to go, it really just was fluff.

The question by the end of the book is the future direction of John. While he has a code he lives by at the end, which kind of implies he only kills bad people, the reality is he has still killed people for money, and he isn’t really punished for his crimes. While he has tried to change directions