2016 'Pacific Burn' Author Barry Lancet on Bridging the Bay Area & Japan through Mystery-ThrillersNEW

Tokyo resident Lancet is the author of an award-winning series of mystery thrillers that feature a San Francisco based protagonist who travels frequently to Japan. He is visiting San Francisco for the debut of the third in the series, Pacific Burn, which follows Japantown and Tokyo Kill.

In this latest installment, part-time antiques dealer, part-time P.I. Jim Brodie is back, taking on the FBI, the CIA, and innumerable suspects in a series of murders affecting his closest friend's family. His investigation takes him through vivid scenes of the Bay Area's architectural and cultural mainstays as Brodie navigates a new role assisting Pacific Rim relations at city hall and barely dodges a shooter attacking from the roof of the Asian Art Museum. Eventually the quest for answers takes Brodie from his beloved San Francisco to Washington, DC and on to Tokyo, Kyoto, and beyond, in search of what his Japanese sources tell him is a legendary killer in both senses of the word-said to be more rumor than real, but deadlier than anything they've encountered, if the whispers are true.

Lancet will talk about Japanese culture, his long tenure as an American in Tokyo, how he parlayed his inside information about Japan into writing fiction, what it's like to write about Japan professionally, and more.

Barry Lancet moved from California to Tokyo in his twenties, where he has lived for more than two decades.  He spent twenty-five years working for one of the country's largest publishers, developing books on dozens of Japanese subjects from art to Zen-all in English and all distributed in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world.

His unique position gave him access to many inner circles in cultural, business, and traditional fields most outsiders are never granted.  Early in his tenure in the Japanese capital, he was hauled in by the police for a non-criminal infraction and interrogated for three hours, one of the most heated psychological encounters he had faced in Japan to that point.  The run-in fascinated him and sparked the idea for a thriller based on his growing number of unusual experiences in Japan.  Lancet is still based in Japan but visits the States frequently. Pacific Burn is his third novel in the Jim Brodie series.