The Earthquake Bird by Susanna Jones

The Earthquake Bird by Susanna Jones won the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for the best crime novel.

Lucy Fly is an English girl from East Yorkshire who works as a translator—Japanese to English. We meet Lucy as she is interrogated by the police. The torso of a woman resembling her missing friend Lily has been found in Tokyo Bay. She was last seen talking with Lucy.

We learn how Lucy met Lily, also from East Yorkshire, in a Tokyo bar, and while Lucy was not interested in befriending her, they began to spend time with each other. There is also Lucy's boyfriend Teiji, and her jealousy about his past relationships.

Did she kill Lily? Will she stop obsessing over Teiji's last girlfriend? The book flips from the modern-day interrogation by the police to this small triangle of friends. In the days leading up to Lily's disappearance, the three of them take a holiday trip to Sado Island. Lucy begins to get jealous of how close the two of them are getting. Is it her imagination?

Lucy isn't a likable person; she keeps trying to get rid of Lily, and her boyfriend is on the outside of the story. Slowly, the truth of what happened is revealed. The mystery was mid-range for me, and the characters were just moderately interesting. However, Susanna has a strange way of telling the story from Lucy's point of view, but she jumps from first to third person. "Arrival at each station was a kind of homecoming for Lucy that night because she knew them so well... at Shinbashi, I passed the old steam engine where I'd once waited for Nasuko..."

I can see each chapter being written from a new standpoint, but it was disconcerting to have it change line by line (hypothetically, the book read like this: "Lucy likes ice cream. But I don't like gelato. So she had a chocolate cone.")

It also didn't help that the two characters had similar names. Between Lucy and Lily, and Lucy jumping between I and She, it was off-putting. Just a mild character study with a little mystery in the background.

I thought it was OK, but I can't recommend it.

2001 / Paperback / 224 pages