'Villain' is a super-modern Japanese thriller set in a desolate landscape of love hotels and lighthouses. It's about loneliness and passion in an utterly soulless environment. Its prose is stripped back and at times almost perfunctory. The plot - ostensibly, the murder of a young girl and the subsequent hunt for and travails of its perpetrator - slides along and is lent zest by flashbacks and constantly changing narrative perspectives. There's a slight dip in the middle when, briefly, it's hard to figure out who to root for, if indeed it's worth rooting for any of them at all. There's also a minor issue with the clunkiness of some of the more colloquial dialogue, but I guess that's just a translation issue that can't really be helped. Those minor gripes aside, it's an excellent book which really comes into its own in the final third, when it becomes virtually unputdownable.