Coming Soon: 'Falling Leaves' by Lea O'Harra

Published 20 February 2026

in Kindle and Paperback.

Book 4 in the Inspector Inoue Mysteries.

One cold night in 1983 in a coastal town in Japan a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl disappears on her way home from badminton practice. The local police explore all avenues, but as is often the case, when there are no clues, there are no answers.

Decades later, the repercussions of her mysterious disappearance are still being felt in Japan in unspoken secrets and lies and broken lives that are left littered behind. When a half-Japanese, half-Korean student is found hanged in her room on the campus of Fujikawa University, the local police at first suspect suicide, never dreaming that this death could possibly be connected to the fortieth anniversary of that schoolgirl's disappearance.

Chief Inspector Inoue and his trusted team of detective inspectors face their most challenging case yet in a race against time to apprehend the culprit before more lives are lost.

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising four murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.

Lea O'Harra – Mystery writer