NAN HAMILTON – Killer’s Rights. Sam Ogara #1, Walker, hardcover, 1984. No paperback edition.

   Nan Hamilton (who is married to mystery novelist John Ball) has written numerous short stories featuring this book’s protagonist, Los Angeles detective Isamu (“Sam”) Ohara. Killer’s Rights is her first novel.

   An established family man who is successful in his career, Nisei detective Ohara knows the traditional antipathy between Japanese and blacks; Ohara’s new black partner. Ted Washington, deals not only with the possibility of that racial tension but also with the struggle to replace Ohara· s old partner. The racial gangs of the prisons spread their violence outside. When a white drug dealer is stabbed, suspicion falls on the Chicano Nuestra Familia and the Black Guerrilla Family.

   But the investigation leads Ohara back into the part of Los Angeles he knows best — the Japanese community. Speaking Japanese and understanding the values and standards of the people so well, Ohara allows himself to slip over the line of professional detachment and become involved. And having done so. he faces the question of what to do when the justice of the courts and the police brings injustice to the Japanese victims.

   Hamilton has created vivid and appealing characters against the backdrops of an Aikido dojo, the doll shop of a master Japanese craftsman. and a seedy-neighborhood drug raid. Sam Ohara is a very likable detective, and the deceptively simple plot gives us the illusion that we know what happened early on, then pulls us up sharply at the end.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.