My apologies to the authors for the low rating, which reflects mostly my difficulty with the unusual format. I was reading the e-book version, and clearly it's actually designed as a serial, with each portion of the story delivered separately, and loses something in book format.

That said, I found the setting complex and interesting: a post-war Tokyo divided into a Chinese-occupied half and a US peacekeeper regulated (?) half. The main characters are a Japanese police officer and a US peacekeeper working as partners to deal with a separate crime in each "episode." In the background arc are political machinations and underground conspiracies on all sides.

However, I found the episodic mysteries generally unsatisfying and the background arc confusing and left hanging at the end of the book to await the next "season" for further development. Again, I'm sorry I couldn't have enjoyed this one more because the premise is interesting. ( )

This is a fun episodic story from Serial Box. It wasn't what I expected going in: for some reason I was expecting more sci-fi, less murder mystery. I still enjoyed it a lot, I just had to adjust my expectation of what I was going to get from each episode. Actually, that's probably my biggest issue with this as a series: I kept having to adjust my expectations. The first few episodes are very episodic, with few things other than the characters and general setting carrying over, with everything being neatly tied up by the end of the episode. And then there was a switch, and there were major plot points left unresolved between episodes. Ultimately, this left us with the final two episodes getting almost no resolution at all. In that, it reminds me of a TV series that ends on a "to be continued" plot so that you'll watch the next season. Now, I already knew there was going to be a Season Two for Ninth Step Station, since it was released before I started listening to this serial. However, based on the early episodes of this story, I didn't expect quite so little resolution at the end of Episode 10.

That said... I still really enjoyed the story. I feel it was well-written, with the different authors somehow managing to have a unified flow and feel to each story. It was very well crafted, and the audio version—narrated by the wonderful Emily Woo Zeller—was the perfect way to experience this serial. ( )

Fun, imaginative sci-fi future with really good main characters. Listened to this as an audiobook on the Serialbox app. ( )

A serialized crime novel written by a team of authors, à la a TV series. Set in the near future, Japan has been invaded by China after being struck by a devastating earthquake; Tokyo is a divided city, with China controlling one half and US peacekeeping forces the other. In an effort to foster trust between the Japanese and the US forces, peacekeeper Emma Higashi is seconded to the Toyko police and partnered with detective Miyako Koreda.

Sound complicated? It is, but the writers never really manage to make the stakes seem as high as they should be. Each episode reads like a standard procedural, albeit with slightly futuristic trappings, and the political situation is given short shrift for most of the season. There's some interesting stuff going on, and Higashi and Koreda are well-written, but I'm not sure if it's enough to bring me back for season two. ( )