In the summer of 1992, patients at a veterans’ hospital in mid-Missouri began dying under suspicious circumstances—but the institution meant to protect them was busy protecting itself. Three decades later, journalist and bestselling author of Tokyo Vice Jake Adelstein comes home to pick up the case his father never stopped investigating.

Strange things were happening at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital. Patients who should have gone home were never making it out. And in Ward 4 East, the loudspeakers kept crackling with an announcement that told the staff someone was about to die: Code Blue.

When staff raised concerns, administrators found a suspect—a nurse. They acted quickly. But they didn’t call the police. Instead, they went after the people trying to tell the truth. The nurse moved on to new jobs, and death followed.

Code Blue tells the story of serial killings in a college town, the cover-up, and the devastating ripple effects of a crime that went unpunished. It is a story of grieving families, courtroom battles, law enforcement agencies that fumbled the case, and whistleblowers who should have been heroes but were treated like criminals. And at the center of it all, the hospital pathologist who started the investigation and asked his son to finish it.

For the first time in thirty years, Jake Adelstein—the bestselling author of Tokyo Vice—returns to his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. Together with his daughter, Beni, and Amy Yoshida-Plambeck, they turn up the heat on a very cold case in a quest for real justice.

A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé, and memoir.

It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organized crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about—for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy—himself.

And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.

The underworld isn’t what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlors are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Korean Japanese and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming.

In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it’s like when you’re in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.

“It might be packaged as a hard-boiled, gonzo tour through Japan’s underworld, but this intricate tale keeps unfolding in unexpected ways … It’s tempting to call this story Chandleresque, but there’s a depth of feeling and undercurrent of spiritual questing that goes beyond Chandler’s remit.” - The Sydney Morning Herald

‘Mafioso, dirty dealings, true crime—it’s all inherently interesting. And Tokyo Noir is exactly the sort of sequel you’d want to the now-seminal Tokyo Vice.’ - Unseen Japan

NOW A MAX ORIGINAL SERIES. A riveting true-life tale of newspaper noir and Japanese organized crime from an American investigative journalist who ”pulls the curtain back on … [an] element of Japanese society that few Westerners ever see” (San Francisco Examiner).

Jake Adelstein is the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where for twelve years he covered the dark side of Japan: extortion, murder, human trafficking, fiscal corruption, and of course, the yakuza. But when his final scoop exposed a scandal that reverberated all the way from the neon soaked streets of Tokyo to the polished Halls of the FBI and resulted in a death threat for him and his family, Adelstein decided to step down. Then, he fought back.

In Tokyo Vice he delivers an unprecedented look at Japanese culture and searing memoir about his rise from cub reporter to seasoned journalist with a price on his head.

“[Adelstein’s] juicy and vividly detailed account of investigations into the shadowy side of Japan shows him to be more enterprising, determined, and crazy than most … Adelstein builds his stories with as much surprise and grit as any Al Pacino or Mark Wahlberg movie, blurring the lines between the cops, the crooks, and even the journalists … Tokyo Vice is often so snappy and quotable that it sounds as if it were a treatment for a Scorsese movie set in Queens … [E]ven as he is getting slapped around by thugs and placed under police protection, Adelstein never loses his gift for crisp storytelling and an unexpectedly earnest eagerness to try to rescue the damned.” - Pico Iyer, Time

“A gripping and absorbing read. Very few foreigners ever come close to discovering what’s really going on in Japan’s closed society. Adelstein chases two major stories that pull him into a vortex of destruction, threatening his friendships, his marriage, and even his life. As he battles with profound issues concerning truth and trust, Tokyo Vice approaches a heart-pounding denouement. This is a terrifying, deeply moral story which you cannot put down, and Adelstein, if occasionally reckless, is an extremely courageous man.” - Misha Glenny, author of McMafia: a journey through the global criminal underworld