Actually, “Slade” is now a pair of people: father and daughter Jay and Rebecca Clark. Jay Clark is one of the original cabal of Canadian lawyers who wrote collectively under the Slade byline, their first novel being a classic serial-killer opus, Headhunter (1984). (Britons may remember that book best because its cover image, featuring a severed head on a pike, drew so much criticism when it was used as an advertising poster in the London Underground, that the posters had to be withdrawn.)
The twelfth and latest Slade thriller, Kamikaze, came out in the States in paperback form earlier this month. What’s the book about? Slade’s “Special X Net” Web site has this explanation:
Genjo Tokuda--a Hiroshima survivor and head of the Yakuza crime syndicate--is lured to Vancouver [British Columbia, Canada] for the Pacific War Vets Convention. The keynote speaker will be one of the crewmen from the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing Tokuda’s entire family.Given the high quality of the Slade novels, and the plaudits their collective author has received (including the Bram Stoker Award in 1996 for Zombie), it’s somewhat surprising that he/they aren’t more widely recognized. But that may be about to change. A film version of Headhunter is currently in production, with a 2008 release date. Perhaps that movie will draw more readers to the books.
Tokuda plans to satisfy the bushido oath he made to his ancestors years ago at the ruins of their Hiroshima shrine. First, he’ll kill the crewman’s family; then, he'll kill the American airman in a fittingly gruesome way.
That crewman is the grandfather of Corporal Jackie Hett of the RCMP’s Special X squad. In Kamikaze, Michael Slade’s newest thriller, Special X will have to stop a killer before he hits too close to home.
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