A Burning Mystery

Last year, a newspaper deliveryman in Japan was brought to trial for killing a seven-year-old girl. After drowning his victim, he used her cell phone to take a digital photo of the body and to send the image to her mother with a text message saying, "I've got your daughter." In a country where truth is often weirder and more gruesome than fiction, few writers can compete with the stories on the evening news. The chilling exception is Miyuki Miyabe, one of Japan's most popular authors. In Crossfire , her third novel to be translated into English, Miyabe's heroine, Junko, sets out...