J. McCarthy Books
J. McCarthy Books
Media Kit · For Press, Bookstores & Librarians
A Keiko Ito Mystery · Book One
About the Book
At the National Art Center Tokyo — a real museum that owns nothing, where every object is borrowed and must be returned — Senior Registrar Keiko Ito inspects a celadon moon jar on loan for a landmark exhibition of Joseon dynasty ceramics. Days later, the Korean researcher who accompanied the jar is found dead in a basement service corridor, having left a careful annotation, handwritten in Korean, on page four of Keiko’s own condition report.
Keiko is not a detective. She is a registrar — a professional whose career rests on the premise that the documented record, kept with enough care, cannot be argued with. She reconciles discrepancies, and the discrepancies lead her to a letter from 1938, a confiscation dressed in administrative language, and a wrong the record has been waiting all this time to make right.
About the Author
Author brand mark
J. McCarthy is the author of The Joseon Retrospective, her debut novel and the first book in the Keiko Ito Mystery Series — mysteries set inside the National Art Center, Tokyo, where the crimes are institutional, the clues live in paperwork, and justice arrives through documentary evidence rather than car chases.
Before turning to fiction, McCarthy spent more than a decade as an acquisitions editor for a national publisher of college and university textbooks, developing an editor’s instinct for structure, accuracy, and clarity — a sensibility that shapes a mystery series in which the truth is assembled from records, files, and the details others overlook. She is also a former high school teacher whose subjects ranged from English and history to photography, and she holds a B.A. in Art and Graphic Design from Point Loma Nazarene University — a background that informs the series’ immersion in the world of curators, registrars, and conservators.
Her travels have taken her across the world, including to Japan, where the Keiko Ito series is set. Her photography appears in The Culture of Dance by Dr. Wendy Guess, a nationally published university text, and in A Walk by the Water by Billy Barnard.
J. McCarthy lives in San Diego, California. The Joseon Retrospective launches in October 2026.
Fact Sheet
The Keiko Ito Mysteries. The Joseon Retrospective is Book 1; further books are planned for 2027.
The National Art Center, Tokyo — a real institution; the novel’s interior layout, staff, and events are entirely fictional.
Mysteries solved through documents — condition reports, provenance files, loan agreements — rather than chases or gunfire.
Colonial-era art and its afterlives, Korea/Japan history, museum ethics, and the quiet power of institutional memory.
Readers of cozy and traditional mysteries, dark academia, and art-world fiction.
A set of archival companion documents — a condition report, a 1938 letter facsimile, a museum floor plan, and an exhibition catalog entry — is available through the author’s newsletter.
Assets & Downloads
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Front cover · 300 dpi
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