Tag: hotel lucky seven

Hotel Lucky Seven is another assassin thriller from Kotaro Isaka featuring a web of assassins in Tokyo whose intersections cause a mess of violence, death, and ridiculousness. Nanao, the unlucky assassin known as Ladybird from Bullet Train, has a job to deliver a birthday present to a room in a hotel, an apparently easy job until a man ends up dead and Nanao discovers he isn’t the only professional in the hotel that day. When he meets Kamino, a woman with a perfect memory who seems to be the focus of these professionals, Nanao is drawn into far more than he expected.

Given that Nanao is one of the main characters, you can guess that this book is very much a follow-up to Bullet Train, even though there are other Isaka books in the same world featuring some of the same characters. Hotel Lucky Seven takes the Bullet Train mould of a single location and far too many assassins, rather than the more wide-ranging (and less comic) The Mantis, and this works very effectively as a fun journey around scheming and mishaps, with plenty of ridiculous deaths. There’s some fascinating character relationships in this one, and some further models for crime duos along similar lines to the citrus-themed pair from Bullet Train.

If you liked Bullet Train, Hotel Lucky Seven is another book in the same vein, with plenty of mishaps, gruesome deaths, and weirdly specifically skilled assassins. It’s ideal for people, like me, who love dark comedy crime films. The translation has a good balance of making sure Japanese-culture-specific elements are clear, whilst not spelling everything out or removing things that give the book its setting and context (and the author’s note at the end about yuzu pepper cheesecake is a funny touch).