A Clean Kill in Tokyo by barry eisler

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

I've been wanting to read this series, but so much time has gone by I realized I needed to reread this book. Unfortunately, I don't remember it at all.

Now I know why. Too much angst. While the rest of the series is supposed to be good, I really don't want to read another right now. Otherwise, my review remains the same, although I'm dropping this to 3 stars.

October2012 Review: 4 stars - A pretty good mystery & thriller, although there's a bit too much angst for me. Reminds me of David Morrell's characters a lot in that way. Good, but not inhumanely so. Rain gets his ass handed to him occasionally & there's nothing magical about his situations or solutions. Good logic. There weren't any of the huge plot holes that so often accompany books of this sort. Also, it's the start of a pretty good series. I actually read the 3d book first & didn't have any trouble going back to this one or enjoying that one.

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Katsumata-kun

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

4 stars, but ultimately not for me.

It’s always nice to find a thriller, or any genre novel for that matter, that’s written with uncommon intelligence and originality.

In this novel I particularly enjoyed Tokyo, jazz, martial arts practice, the man-without-a-country theme, the cultural comparisons, and the unfolding relationship between Rain and the daughter of one of his victims along with the soul searching it provokes.

That said, after finally sampling this series, I know I was right to hesitate to take it on. There is so much full-on grisly physical violence that it eventually overwhelms the positives and becomes the lingering thing I’m left with when I’m finished.

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eroeru

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

There are things about assassin John Rain's last kill that are bothering him. As he begins to investigate the things that are niggling his brain, he becomes obsessed with the victim's daughter. The more he finds out about the victim, the more it becomes clear that the daughter is also in danger and it also puts John on the hit list by several factions within Tokyo.

This was a decent first book to a series. I liked John's character - he's got some issues/flaws but he still retains a sliver of morality. I think what I liked best about him was his desire to feel like he belongs somewhere. Unfortunately, at the end of the book, he hasn't quite achieved that. My guess is that he will continue to search for that in future books and I'm invested enough to go along for the journey.

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kitari

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

Aborted about 20% in. My second time trying to stay with the book. I love the author's narration but this wasn't the action-thriller I was expecting, but a book on living in Japan. The author clearly loves Japan and Japanese culture from what little I listened to but that's not the reason why I bought this. It may turn into a real assassin thriller book but I can't wait that long since I'm already familiar with the people and the culture having many Japanese friends and clients.

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Brittanymariew

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

Eisler is apparently a former CIA operative
and Silicon Valley lawyer. He also writes thrillers. This book is about
John Rain, who is similar to Jason Bourne, a highly trained assassin.
Rain is half Japanese and half American and lived in both worlds. He is
a former Vietnam War commando. He is haunted by his past and by
his present. He does murder for hire and his murders look like natural
or accidental deaths. All or almost all of the action takes places in
Tokyo and Eisler does a super job of describing the city, the customs,
the attitude. It is a fast paced thriller with plenty of fights and intrigue.

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Nyan_chann

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

This is my first "John Rain" novel and I must admit, I liked it enough to read more! The 'damaged but honorable' lone-hero style reminds me a lot of Lee Child's "Reacher" series, but without all the sentence fragments (thankfully)! Plus,I love anything that deals with culture and identity, and Rain's Japanese/American duality adds a dimension to him which causes a certain amount of unrest, and I found that really interesting. Also, the story itself moved at a good, quick pace, and held my attention to the very end. Recommended.

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Executor23

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

The details the author wanted to explain got in the way of the story. I didn't hate the book, just didn't enjoy it.

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Skygerby

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

A Clean Kill in Tokyo (formerly published as Rain Fall) is the first book in the John Rain series, about an ex-military assassin who is half American and half Japanese. I had met Rain before, peripherally, in the Livia Lone & Killer Collective books, and been intending to check this earlier series out. Finding books 2 and 4 going cheap at a market was the prompt I needed to source Book 1, so used an Audible credit to download the audiobook, which we listened to on a return trip to the Lake. I enjoyed this - particularly the novelty of the Japanese setting, and will happily continue the series.

John Rain specialises in killings for hire that look like the victim died of natural causes. Haunted by his experiences in the Vietnam war, he has a strict code of who he will and won’t target. When he witnesses his latest victim, a corrupt politician, being frisked by a Westerner on the subway as he lies dying, he senses something is amiss. Looking further into the case, Rain gets close to the man’s daughter, a beautiful jazz pianist, and uncovers evidence which threatens powerful people at the heart of the Japanese government. Now the hunter is the hunted, and only exposing the truth can save them both.

This was first published in 2002 but holds up pretty well from a technology and geopolitical point of view. The audiobook is read by the author himself, who has an attractive voice that was easy to listen to, although considering he’s relating a first person past story where most of the dialogue would’ve been in Japanese, he doesn’t sound at all how I would expect Rain to speak.
There’s plenty of action and fight scenes which are fluidly described so I could actually picture them happening - Eisler does this better than the average thriller writer, and it was easy to keep track of what was happening throughout. Rain is rather a cold fish but as we learn his background we understand why he’s ended up that way.

I thought I read that these books were being turned into a TV series featuring Keanu Reeves, but nothing came of it, then discovered that a movie was made of this one in 2009, but even Gary Oldman as Holtzer couldn’t save it from a straight to DVD release!

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John Rain #1

A Clean Kill in Tokyo

barry eisler

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Midori Kawamura

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barry eisler

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