Lost girls & love hotels - Catherine Hanrahan

Margaret is doing everything in her power to forget home, and Tokyo's exotic nightlife-teeming with drink, drugs, and three-hour love hotels enables her to keep her demons at bay. Working as an English specialist at Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute by day and losing herself in a sex- and drug-addled oblivion by night, Margaret represses memories of her painful childhood and her older brother Frank's descent into madness.

But Margaret's deliberate nihilism is thrown off balance as she becomes increasingly haunted by images of a Western girl missing in Tokyo. And when she meets Kazu, a mysterious gangster, their affair sparks a chain of events that could spell tragedy for Margaret, in a city where it's all too easy to disappear.

Catherine Hanrahan was born in Montreal and has lived in England, Thailand, and Japan. LOST GIRLS AND LOVE HOTELS is her first novel.