FIVE BODIES. ONE CLUE. NOT A TRACE OF THE KILLER. San Francisco antiques dealer Jim Brodie recently inherited a stake in his father' s Tokyo-based private investigation firm, which means the single father of six-year-old Jenny is living a busy intercontinental life, traveling to Japan to acquire art and artifacts for his store and consulting on Brodie Security' s caseload at home and abroad. One night, an entire family is gunned down in San Francisco' s bustling Japantown neighborhood, and Brodie is called on by the SFPD to decipher the lone clue left at the crime scene: a unique Japanese character printed on a slip of paper drenched in blood. Brodie can' t read the clue. But he may have seen it before— at the scene of his wife' s death in a house fire four years ago. With his deep array of Asian connections and fluency in Japanese, Brodie sets out to solve a seemingly perfect crime and at the same time learn whether his wife' s tragic death was more than just an accident. And as he unravels a web of intrigue stretching back centuries and connected to the murders in San Francisco, the Japantown killer retaliates with a new target: Brodie' s daughter.