THE SPECIAL PRISONER, by Jim Lehrer. New York: Random House, 2000, 230 pp., $23.95 (cloth).
In "The Tokyo Zodiac Murders," which takes place in 1979, two detectives set out to crack a decades-old (fictitious) crime that has baffled the entire nation. The story is told from the perspective of Kazumi Ishioka, who plays a bumbling Dr. Watson to the brilliant amateur detective, astrologer and fortune teller Kiyoshi Mitarai.
The chronology begins with the murder of artist Heikichi Umezawa on a snowy night in February 1936 -- coincidentally the same evening that rebel army officers attempted the famous Feb. 26 coup d'etat.