My initial impressions of this book weren’t good. The story takes Rei away from Japan, the country she chooses to live in and the setting that makes the books a really interesting read for me. As well as going to what I thought would be a more mundane location I thought there were several bits of unrealistic plot happenings early in the book. Rei, still fairly new to the antiquities business is entrusted with taking a shipment of valuable old kimono from a museum in Tokyo to a museum in Washington DC and the whole setup and incompetence of the two museums didn’t ring true for me.

Of course I should have trusted the author more as most of the things that bugged me in the beginning turned out to be plot devices rather than plot holes by the end of the book. And the transition to the United States worked pretty well too. Rei is half American and grew up in California and the inclusion of her parents in this book definitely furthered the personal side of the series. There was also a lot of things where we saw America through the eyes of Japanese tourists and so the setting wasn’t as run of the mill as I’d been expecting but actually worked pretty well.

In the end the plot wasn’t as good as it could have been but the side of the story dealing with Rei’s relationships really developed very well in this book and I like it as an episode in the series though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t following the series. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what Massey does with the characters next.