Tomomi Ishikawa's suicide is anything but ordinary. There is no body, no trace of her mark on the world besides a cryptic suicide note left for her friend and confidant Ben Constable. But the note is just the beginning--within it, Ben finds clues that lead him into the eerie, hidden past of Tomomi, known to her friends as Butterfly. As Ben traces Butterfly's story across the streets of Paris, then over the ocean to New York City, her story gets darker and more twisted; soon, Ben is questioning not only his friendship with the presumed-dead Butterfly, but the very nature of their relationship.
Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa, Ben Constable's debut, is a dark, imaginative novel that is as creative as it is suspenseful. As Constable the author follows the fictional Ben on Butterfly's treasure hunt across the world, readers are drawn into a story that is really a story within a story within a story; Constable's naming the main character after himself is only an added layer of complexity in an already intricately complicated novel. Though it requires a bit of patience at first, this complex structure pays off. Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa is beautiful and haunting, blurring the lines between what is real and what is imagined--and how much it really matters when we are telling a story. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm