Read @ Joe’s

Title: Hotel Lucky Seven (2024) Author: Kōtarō Isaka Publisher: Abrams Book jacket: All the unluckiest assassin in the world has to do is deliver a painting to a hotel guest. Easy enough, except when Ladybird makes the delivery, he realizes that the guest is clearly not the guy in the painting. Then he attacks Ladybird, they fight, and the guest ends up dead. How can such simple jobs always go wrong? Joe says: Although tedious at times, Hotel Lucky Seven has fortune on its side and makes for fun crime-fiction escapism of its own.

Kinetic and comedic, Kōtarō Isaka’s latest in his Assassins series is also slightly confusing. At times, Hotel Lucky Seven reads like a screenplay and, based on the successful adaptation of his novel Bullet Train, there might have been a killer of a reason for that. Right, Hollywood?

Hotel Lucky Seven starts with a simple premise. Nanao, Isaka’s unlucky assassin code named Ladybird, is tasked to deliver a birthday parcel in the Winton Palace Hotel. Nanao bumbles and stumbles and soon realizes he needs to leave the hotel – fast. But then the overall plot deepens. There just so happens to be professional cleaners, the team of Pillow and Blanket, also within the hotel, also looking to depart, and with bodies in tow. Then Yuka Kamino, a former employee of the hotel’s manager, has seen too much. Now, she has the fabled assassin team known as the Six after her. Kamino, yup, is also trying to escape the hotel.

So much escaping! Although tedious at times, Hotel Lucky Seven has fortune on its side and makes for fun crime-fiction escapism of its own.

Isaka has a loose, easy style to his prose. He keeps the action moving and tone – although littered with assassins assassing – light. This bounce becomes weighted as he introduces more and more players – especially all six of the Six – and infuses them with personalities and back stories and salad dressing preferences. Again, added visuals for a possible on-screen adaptation would no doubt lead to a cleaner scorecard. Within a first time read, though, such introductions are choppy. Isaka is a master juggler but sometimes three balls in the air can be just as entertaining as eighteen chainsaws on fire.

Isaka is a master juggler but sometimes three balls in the air can be just as entertaining as eighteen chainsaws on fire.

Fans of Isaka will no doubt enjoy reading the return of Ladybird. Fans of the David Leitch movie might find it too much. Hotel Lucky Seven is an enjoyable escapade at a three-star hotel with a late-afternoon check-out.

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Dōmo arigatō to Abrams and Netgalley for the advance read.