Angel's Blade by Gaku Yakumaru is a remarkable and amazing tale of revenge, atonement, guilt, crime and punishment. I definitely will look forward to more of Mr. Yakumaru's books.
Outline of the story: a widowed coffee shop owner is struggling to find balance between his duty as a single father and his business, plus the pain of losing his beloved wife is still haunting him: Four years ago, his wife was brutally killed in a break-in, with the couple's five months old daughter watching. Later it turns out all three of her murderers were minors (underage teenagers) so they didn't even have to go to prison--they only got sent to reform-schools.
Now four years later, one of those murderers, a teenager known only as Boy B is found killed near the shop owner's workplace and naturally police suspects the shop owner is somewhat involved. Old wounds are reopened and the widowed shop owner must confront the phantoms from his and his wife's painful past, and the other two teenage murderers Boy A and Boy C are also fearing for their own lives.
Is there really an invisible Angel's Blade dealing out justice to those unpunished criminals? Who is the killer of those teenage murderers? What is his/her purpose? Is the wife's death an unlucky coincidence of 'wrong place, wrong time' or is something deeper and more subtle lurking beneath the surface? Come and find out.
I like how the murder mystery is so skillfully laid out and revealed to us, layer by layer. I like how there is no 'black and white' answer, I also like the final plot twists and the breathtakingly written final struggle between the bad guy and the MC. I like how the issues of crime and punishment, and the flaws in the Japanese legal system is discussed from different sides and angles throughout the story telling (and not once would you feel the author is lecturing you). Last but not least, I like how realistically and smoothly written the characters are. So, five stars.
PS: the location of the story happens to be a Japanese town I'd visited before, much to my amusement.