Review of "Hakugin Jack" / 白銀ジャック

To be honest, this novel started off very slowly so it took me a long time to move past the first 100-pages or so because I found that the case was really getting nowhere. What's more, there were no possible suspects throughout much of the story and it was only till the very last juncture that the pieces of the puzzle fell together quickly. There were people who looked suspicious but in the end, they all turned out to be false guesses. The actual criminals were people who didn't have anything suspicious going on throughout the whole story. In fact, I felt like the truth was shoved right into my face and I just had to accept it even though I did not agree with some parts of the "truth" or how certain things developed.

For a suspense thriller to be engaging, it must allow the reader to feel like they are involved in the developments e.g. by giving clues for the reader to guess or deduce the truth so that they continue to be interested in the novel. However, I kept feeling that I was an outsider all this while and seriously, this meant that whatever happened to the characters didn't matter that much to me. If this case was really as exciting and intriguing as it promised, the truth was pretty much of an anti-climax. The tempo of the story was rather off with the pacing being extremely slow and suddenly accelerating in the last 40 pages or so and then screeching to a sudden halt when things settled down.

In conclusion, I think that this is a pretty disappointing work but I hope to see a better version with the live skiing scenes when the drama SP starring Watanabe Ken, Hirosue Ryoko and Okada Masaki gets shown this summer.