The Mask by Taylor Stevens

With perfect twenty-twenty hindsight, when it was too late to really matter, she'd pin the discomfort down to the muted screams of instinct, that sixth sense of animal knowledge trying to tell her that her other senses were lying, that this was more than what it seemed.

- Taylor Stevens, The Mask

Vanessa Michael Munroe arrives in Japan, to be picked up at the airport by Miles Bradford, a close friend. She is recovering from a brutal attack that almost killed her during a job that did not go well. She is living with Bradford, trying to regain her equilibrium, while he’s working as a security consultant at a high-tech firm trying to uncover who within the firm is sharing information with other companies. 

Munroe is using her time to pick up Japanese and explore, which she does on her motorcycle while Bradford is at the office, but she is getting antsy and wants something to do. She asks him if she can work with him, but he keeps her away from the office as much as possible. The one time she goes there, he insists that she wear her most feminine clothes and introduces her around. Not long after her visit, there are two murders at the company.

The book is divided into two parts, the days leading up to and then after the murders. When Bradford is arrested and charged as the murderer, Munroe takes over his job as a way of finding the truth and getting him out of prison.

V. M. Munroe is meant to be another Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson's Millenium series. They share high level technology skills and fighting skills that defy human physiology, and both learned their trade despite the physical and psychological damage they experienced while coming of age. Munroe and Salander have few relationships, and the ones they have are hopelessly complicated. And neither is afraid of breaking the law if that is what is needed to get the job done. Munroe, however, does her work out in the open, and she can get away with this by sometimes presenting as a woman (Vanessa) and sometimes as a man (Michael). 

The Mask is the 5th book of the Vanessa Michael Munroe series by Taylor Stevens. I had not read any of the books leading up to this one, so I didn't know the backstory of Munroe or the other characters, but Stevens provides enough information to flush Munroe out as a character and to pique my interest in the series. 

The biggest flaw of the book is the writing. Up until the second part of the book after the murders, it was difficult to relax into the reading, because it seems that every sentence, every paragraph is written with overly stylistic structure and vocabulary so different from the everyday that it kept me on edge, and not in a good way.

There were also too many overt references to the dark future for the main characters, as if the reader weren’t smart enough to know that in this type of book things would go wonky and become dangerous. I found the future references at the end of each of the early chapters annoying as they disrupted the flow of the narrative and served to give the reader a chance to just put the book down rather than as a hook to keep the reader engaged. 

In fact, these two issues, the convoluted sentences and clumsy foreshadowing, were not in the second part of the book, and this stylistic change made it seem that the first and second parts of the book had different authors.

I enjoyed reading how Munroe navigated the complexity of Japanese work culture, corporate espionage, and intermingling of the law and underworld, and how she made it out in one piece. There was a good balance of fast-paced action and violence with slower scenes of planning and watching, allowing the reader to take a breath occasionally. Despite the writing flaws, this book would appeal to anyone who wants their hero to be a woman who can fight and think but not wear a cape.