Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl
An empty elevator. A missing girl. A brother’s obsessive search for the truth.
In southern Japan, a young woman enters an elevator in a bar building late at night. But when the doors open, she has vanished. Fifteen years later, her younger brother Kaito has risen up the ranks to police inspector, still haunted by his sister’s disappearance.
On a sleepy island in Okinawa, Kaito tracks down Mr. Shimada, a senior officer who once solved an impossible elevator crime decades earlier. The unlikely pair travels back to the city where Kaito’s sister first disappeared — to the very elevator where it occurred. Together, they retrace her steps and uncover the truth of what happened that night.
The story of a lost family, lifelong regrets, and quiet desperation, Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl pulses with action and leaves readers yearning for resolution.
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Will Ferguson is a bestselling author whose work has spanned fiction, travel writing, history, and humour. His literary thriller 419 won the Giller Prize in 2012, and his novel The Finder received the 2021 Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction. A three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humor, he has been nominated for both the IMPAC Dublin Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
Ferguson’s travels have taken him around the globe. He lived in Japan for five years and regularly returns to visit his extended family. He is the author of the celebrated Japanese travel memoir Hitching Rides with Buddha (originally titled Hokkaido Highway Blues) and the budget The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Japan. He walked across Northern Ireland in Beyond Belfast, travelled Canada in Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, and journeyed through central Africa in Road Trip Rwanda. His debut novel, Happiness, was sold into 23 languages. Ferguson has written for The New York Times, Esquire UK, and Canadian Geographic. He lives in Calgary.
