Robert Goddard (2023) The Fine Art of Uncanny Predictions

Robert Goddard has written a stack of books. None of which I’ve read or been aware of. He’s a bit hitter. Stephen King and Lee Child are among is fans. The Fine Art of Uncanny Predictions has multiple timelines, many characters and complicated plots. But we know as a reader it will be resolved and the world set to right.

The What If of fiction is topical. What if Himeko Sato, a childminder and domestic service, known as the Kobe Sensitive, because of her ability to predict earthquakes, sent the authorities a warning, but they ignored it?

Japan has a history of earthquakes. The most recent in the Kumamoto region.  The earthquake - estimated at 6.8 magnitude by the US seismologists.  

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c9q2481v855t

What if?   She predicts two of modern Japan’s most destructive natural disasters:

1.            The 1995 Kobe Earthquake (Great Hanshin Earthquake).

2.            The 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami (which led to the Fukushima disaster. Magnitude: 9.0.  Type: Megathrust quake along the Japan Trench . One of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. It led to a massive tsunami, with waves up to 40 metres in some areas).

According to the storyline Sato phoned the authorities prior to both seismic events to sound the alarm, but on both occasions, her predictions were dismissed as hoaxes or ignored by authorities.

The story begins with another world-shaking event. The dropping of an atomic bomb in Hiroshami. Goro Rinzaki survives it. It confirms what he already knows. Japan is finished. He’s an orphan and used to new beginnings. He makes sure he’s at the forefront of the new American World Order. And ditching his farsighted mentor in the orphanage, the MacGuffin is the ledgers he takes from the burning building. This gives him leverage and a future.

They turn up in the first and last pages.

But largely it’s an entertaining contest and quest. A page turner. Goro Rinzaki (aged villain) v the unflappable heroine and narrator, Umiko Wada. She is a quiet, observant widow whose husband died as a result of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack. She gets a job as secretary in the Kodaka Detective Agency and following her boss's mysterious death takes over his role. Her work is her life. Her life is her work.

She follows Kodaka into his past dealings with Rinzaki, the Kobe Sensitve and Clyde Braxton, whose murky dealings with Rinzaki made a killing in both sides of the Pacific Sea.

Kodaka was a classic, hard-drinking, ambulance-chasing private eye whose 1995 investigation into the financial secrets of Jinno Construction runs parallel to Wada’s present-day search.

Great plot and I’ll be reading more of Robert Goddard. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6