Point Zero

This book is one of the few times where I've read a mystery that didn't really take a full-on negative view of women's sex work, though it focuses more on the ability of a woman to survive the post-war years in Japan. In one aspect, you can tell the characters are still quite conservative and wouldn't think it acceptable if women chose to engage in sex work (it's okay "because they had to").

I do still find it compelling, though, because it is more of a crime of coincidence with a chain of continuation. The first person to go missing knew the killer's identity from his previous work, but he had no desire to ruin her life. Her motive stems from her paranoia of what he might do rather than what he will do, and she assumes the worst rather than communicating with him about it directly. Everyone after that is a victim of circumstance, who had to be removed for whatever their knowledge of the killer was.

Again, I also like that the focus wasn't on the police solving the murder. In fact, they're far more often background characters than people who are doing much of anything to try solving this case. It provides a good starting point for what we could do without them, regardless of whether or not that was the author's intent.