East Is East - Hardcover

Lathen, Emma

3.75

107 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671737074 ISBN 13: 9780671737078

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1991

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In Japan to head off a possible takeover, Sloan Guaranty Trust's executive vice president, John Putnam Thatcher, finds himself caught up in a tea ceremony that involves unscrupulous business practices, murder, and mystery

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From Publishers Weekly:

John Putnam Thatcher's 21st adventure (his first since 1988's Something in the Air ) takes the senior banking executive from the Sloan Guaranty Trust building in Manhattan on evenly paced travels to Japan, Alaska and England. Lackawanna Electric Industries, rebounding from bankruptcy under the forceful leadership of Carl Kruger, is about to pull off a distribution coup with Yonezawa Trading, one of Japan's largest corporations. Thatcher is present at the Tokyo signing, which is delayed by the discovery of a murdered accountant in Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Investment and a note suggesting a $1-million bribe. Business interests collide with political issues as the success of Lackawanna hangs in the balance. Changes in Japanese traditions are probed and suspicion falls on a Yonezawa rival; other factions vested in Lackawanna's fate include a group of old political hands in Washington, D.C.; officers of a robotics firm recently purchased by Kruger; and, of course, the CEO's inner circle. While the characterization is flatter than in earlier series entries, the plot here is dense and satisfying, and the tone reliably knowledgeable of modern business mores.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Banker-sleuth John Putnam Thatcher gets dragooned during his Japanese trip into authorizing giant Lackawanna Electric's sale of tiny, red-hot British robotics affiliate Midland Research to the Yanezawa Trading Corporation--all in return for a pile of cash and the vital authorization from the Ministry of International Trade and Investment (MITI) to sell electric generators in Japan. The murder of an incompetent MITI underling, however, wrecks the talks and sends ambitious Lackawanna chief Carl Kruger home under a cloud of gravely courteous Japanese innuendo. But whether he's being torpedoed by a Japanese competitor, a potential political opponent, or somebody in Lackawanna--well, only Thatcher, surely the most self-effacing veteran of 20 detective novels, can figure that out. An unusually clever, often riotously funny performance by the acknowledged master of murder among the M.B.A.s. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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