AUTHOR: Sarah Dupeyron
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
APPROXIMATE LENGTH: 236 pages (paperback)
Recommended for fans of crime thrillers and guilty-pleasure romances novels.
GENRE
Thriller—Romance
Hashimoto Blues
is set up like a thriller, with a menacing villain who terrorizes the
protagonist, Ellie, but much of it reads like a romance novel. There is a lot
of focus on the relationship between Ellie and her lover, from their first
meeting to their blooming relationship to their ultimate dependency on each
other to survive when everything goes to hell.
PACE
The novel opens with the kind of hook
that leaves a reader wanting to know how it came to this, then goes back and
tells Ellie’s story starting with how she went from teenage runaway to drug
smuggler. Dupeyron takes the time to develop Ellie’s background and
relationships before introducing the titular villain, Hashimoto. After that,
the book becomes a fast-paced thriller as it follows Ellie’s attempts to escape
Hashimoto’s brutality.
PERSPECTIVE
First person past. The story is told
from Ellie’s point of view and captures many of her internal musings. Ellie is
a straightforward and matter-of-fact narrator who tells the reader exactly how
she thinks and what she sees.
CONTENT REVIEW
Hashimoto
Blues
tells the story of Ellie Fox, a vivacious young woman who makes a living
smuggling drugs in her ultralight airplane, which she received as a twentieth
birthday present from her mentor, employer, and father-figure, Frank. When
Frank introduces Ellie to another protégé of his, the roguish and handsome Max
Cameron, Ellie immediately falls in love. When Max proposes a plan to steal a
priceless painting from the ruthless crime lord Kendo Hashimoto, both Ellie and
Frank call him crazy but are ultimately enticed by the prospect of such a big
take. The job goes horribly wrong, and Ellie finds herself running for her life
with Max.
The
first chapter depicts Ellie and Max receiving a terrifying message from
Hashimoto—a human eyeball. Ellie describes Max as a bruised and disillusioned
version of the man she fell in love with, and she repeatedly asks herself why
she’d agreed to his suicidal plan. The specter of the disaster to come looms
over each of the ensuing chapters until that fateful moment when Max says, “Do
you want to play a Game?”
Although
set against the backdrop of a thriller, this book is first and foremost a
romance. After opening the novel with a chilling hook, Dupeyron backtracks and
takes her time to set up Ellie’s world before sending her on the job that will
destroy it all. Hashimoto Blues contains all the must-haves of a guilty
pleasure: a sympathetic female protagonist, a fascinating backdrop, and lots of
chemistry. Max is the quintessential bad-boy fantasy: good-looking, charming,
and yet dangerous—he never speaks of the illegal jobs he performs for Frank. He
loves Ellie with the kind of ardor all women dream of, making him the perfect
romantic lead.
Ellie,
meanwhile, is instantly likable. She’s far from perfect—apart from being a
pot-smoking drug smuggler with a tendency to internally judge people, she can
also be a little arrogant. And yet if nothing else, she comes across as
genuine. Her morals might be somewhat skewed, but she’s good to the people she
cares about. She also has the admirable ability to keep her head when
everything around her is going to hell, which becomes vital once she finds
herself the target of Hashimoto’s murderous intentions.
The
world Dupeyron creates is somewhat incongruent, and that’s part of its appeal.
It’s easy to root for Ellie and Max even though, as Max finally points out
toward the end of the book, they are the bad guys. They are good people working
for a criminal enterprise. Hashimoto, on the other hand, turns out to be a twisted
sadist who doesn’t just want the deaths of the people who cross him; he wants
to toy with them first.
Dupeyron’s
down-to-earth writing neatly captures Ellie’s voice and brings her to life on
the page. When it comes to the thriller aspects of the story, Dupeyron is as
merciless as Hashimoto, depicting the brutal crime lord’s cruelty in a way that
makes the audience cheer Ellie on when she and Max ultimately decide to turn
the tables on him and take him out before he catches up to them.
Both
a steamy romance and a blood-chilling thriller, Hashimoto Blues is the kind of book that many women will enjoy. It
contains all the elements of popular romances but goes beyond its genre through
its portrayal of Ellie’s life as a criminal. It is undeniably entertaining and,
once Hashimoto enters the picture, virtually impossible to put down.
THE NITPICKY STUFF
This book is well edited and contains
no distracting errors. There are a teeny, tiny, barely perceptible number of
typos.
This book contains a lot of adult
content—language, sex, and violence. Although the violence is not gratuitous or
violent, what is implied can be rather disturbing.
AUTHOR INFO
[From Amazon.com’s author page]
I really want to read this now :-) Ultralight airplanes and priceless art heists - I sense influences from the remake of the Thomas Crown Affair! Great review...
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