Meet John Rain. Assassin. He follows his own code - he needs no one, trusts no one - until betrayal transforms him from hunter into hunted and loner into loyal friend. Haunted by the past Rain kills to order and leaves no trace, but the death at his hand of an old man has unforeseen complications - and soon Rain is trying to protect not just his carefully preserved anonymity but his own life and those of the people he cares for. A stunning, page-turning reinvention of the hitman thriller, "Rain Fall" marks the introduction of a compelling new series character and major new thriller writing career.

John Rain, a Japanese American konketsu, or half-breed, learned his lethal trade as a member of the U.S. Special Forces. Although tortured by memories of atrocities he committed in Vietnam, he has become a paid assassin, a solitary man who lives in the shadows and trusts no one, even those who pay extraordinary sums for his ability to make murder look like natural death. But the aftermath of an otherwise routine hit on a government bureaucrat brings Rain to the attention of two men he knows from the old days in Vietnam: a friend who's now a Tokyo cop and an enemy who betrayed Rain long ago and is now the CIA's station chief in Japan. Like the gangster who hired Rain to kill Yasuhiro Kawamura, they want something the dead man had--a computer disk containing proof of high-level corruption, information that could destroy Japan's ruling political coalition. The search for the disk leads them to a woman Rain has come to love, a talented young jazz musician who also happens to be Kawamura's daughter. In this taut, brilliantly paced debut thriller, set in a vividly rendered Tokyo, the author manages an unlikely feat; he earns the reader's sympathy and concern for his protagonist, an amoral assassin who is one of most compelling characters in recent crime fiction. --Jane Adams

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