Girl in a Box

About 2/3 of the way through Girl in a Box, I realized that even though it was published in 2006, I haven't seen the next Rei Shimura mystery.  Have I reached the end of another series?  I checked amazon.com and it turns out I haven't - there's one more volume, but that's probably a good thing.  I've enjoyed the series, but Massey may have written herself into a box.

Rei Shimura started the series as an English teacher in Tokyo, became an antiques dealer, and as of The Typhoon Lover has become a spy of sorts, working for a shadow intelligence agency which apparently has only one other employee, ex-Navy officer Michael Hendricks.  Her mission (which she chooses to accept) is to infiltrate a Tokyo department store with questionable profits and possible links to US businesses.  It's an interesting premise, and Massey keeps the plot fairly tight for about 3/4 of the book.  Unfortunately, it feels a bit like she rushed the ending, leaving the conclusion somewhat confusing and the evolving relationship between Rei and Michael feeling like it was grafted onto a completed novel.   Perhaps Massey realized that she had to start winding up the series - and maybe that's why I got the feeling around page 200 that this might be the last Rei Shimura mystery.

The Typhoon Lover

In her early twenties, Japanese-American Rei Shimura fell into two careers - one as an antiques expert and one as a detective.  A decade and eight novels later, Rei is now 30 and Sujita Massey has solved the problem of how to explain why a woman in a seemingly genteel job keeps coming across dead bodies.  The day after Rei's surprise 30th birthday party (thrown at a hot new club by her on-and-off fiance, Hugh), she drags herself to a 9 am interview at the Smithsonian...except it's at rather than with the museum.  Rei's former lover, Takedo, has apparently become involved in smuggling antiquities out of Iraq and the CIA thinks Rei can use him to recover an ancient ewer.  

Maybe Rei fell for the bait (she's been barred from traveling to Japan and if she takes this job, the State Department will end that), or maybe she realizes that her relationship with Hugh (described as arguments punctuated by great sex) is falling apart.  Either way, she did not expect to find Takeo engaged to a high-strung girl from a political family or that she and Takeo would have a one night stand in the middle of a storm.  After some dead ends, Rei finds that the smuggler is much closer than she though.