What We Buried

For nineteen years, Ren Ishida has kept a Kawasaki warehouse in good repair, and kept off one strip of concrete at the west end of its service bay. He knows what lies under it. He put it there.

Ren manages property for the Kitasawa-kai, an aging yakuza family that survives Japan’s anti-gang laws by hiding inside construction firms, shell companies and other people’s names. He collects rents, chooses contractors and decides who gets the keys. He is very good at finding reasons.

Now the family is selling the warehouse. The demolition crews are booked for Friday. The chairman’s nephew wants a clean handover, the records room has a new lock, and a memorandum lands on Ren’s desk making him personally responsible for every repair to that strip since 2007. A detective he has traded favors with for twenty years shows him a page bearing his forged signature. Someone has decided the story will end with Ren.

All he has is a forgotten green ledger marked for pulping, a lawyer who won’t let him lie, and five days to choose between the man who made him and the friend he helped bury.

What We Buried is a dark, street-level crime novel about loyalty, guilt and the paperwork of a killing, told by an insider who knows exactly how the machine works because he spent his life oiling it. Book One of The Buried Ledger Duology; the story concludes in What We Owe.