Rating: 
Summary: Missed opportunity
Review: The second in Massey's series is a disappointment. Her heroine, Rei, behaves erratically throughout, making for puzzling psychology. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. It's hard to figure out why Rei does what she does, and while the mystery plot line holds together, the character does not.
Rating: 
Summary: Lousy story wrapped in a furoshiki
Review: There are some nice Japanese culture tidbits in this book but overall there's not much going on here....Weak, cardboard like secondary characters, wildly erratic behavior by main character. The plot bounces around too much and since you don't have too much attachment to the characters, you really don't care where they end up. Character dialogue is weak at times and jerky...I frequently felt like I had missed a sentence or two but it was just poor dialogue. It's been a long time since I've read a book that I thought it better to throw out than to possible burden another human being with a story of such lacking. You'd be better off to read some real Japanese mysteries by Miyuki Miyabe or Akimitsu Takagi than this Gaijin-lite stuff. ...
Rating: 
Summary: Simply Captivating
Review: This second in the utterly charming Rei Shimura series is even more delightful--and more addictive--than its wonderful predecessor, "The Salaryman's Wife."In this story, Ms. Shimura has taken some giant strides. She now lives in luxury with her lover, Hugh Glendenning, the Scots lawyer--but as always, her simple Japanese side is at war with her American side over the opulence of their apartment. She has given up her lowly job, and is now selling antiques, her lifelong dream. Her Japanese side allows her entree into the most conservative of Japanese homes, while her American side allows her to bargan cannily for the best price. Such is the situation when we happily meet Ms. Shimura again in "Zen Attitude." She has been hired on consignment by a major player in the antiques world, the formidable Nana Mihori. One antiquing coup with Mihori can set Shimura up for life. Therefore, when she finds the quintessential "tansu," a ceremonial chest of drawers worth millions of yen, Ms. Shimura is overjoyed. She spends way too much on behalf of her client, has the priceless piece delivered to her own apartment--and then finds out to her horror that it is a fake. And that's just the beginning. Throw in Hugh's majorly cool but spoiled rotten brother Angus, who will smoke anything and everything in sight; a hip young car salesman who may or may not be a serial killer; a buddhist temple run by the Mihoris but seemingly fraught with evil; and the overly macho, very scary daughter of the Mihori clan, and you have but a taste of the adventures to come. All I will say here is...all is NOT what it seems. This series is a find. An absolute treasure. I cannot wait to ready the next, and recommend Ms. Massey's unique, deceptively zenlike series to anybody who likes the truly different.
Rating:
Summary: Great story, I loved it
Review: This was the first Mystery/Who-did-it story I have ever read. So I don't have any other books of this kind to base this review on. But that didn't stop me from liking this story. It's plot was compelling, and showed some views of Japanese life that I've never known about. The one down side to the story is that this is, once again, another book that stuck sex into it. I thought it would have been better if that was left out of the story. Yet, the plot reddemed it's self and turned out to be a good story.
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