Guillaume Simoneau’s *Murder*, published by MACK in 2019, begins with a family memory from spring 1982: a nest of orphaned crows adopted by Simoneau’s family after a tree fell. Photographs made by Simoneau’s mother preserve that episode as an intimate, lyrical vision of childhood, including the striking image of the young photographer with crows perched on his shoulders. Nearly four decades later, Simoneau returns to this memory through photographs made in Kanazawa, Japan, in the springs of 2016 and 2017.

Kanazawa carries a particular weight in the book. It is identified as the birthplace of Masahisa Fukase’s *Karasu* (*Ravens*), the post-war work that provides a conceptual point of reference. Simoneau’s new images move through that landscape—its thatched houses, pine forests, coastline, and traditions—while adopting a crisp, architectural visual language distinctly grounded in its own time. The relationship is not one of simple homage: several photographs directly address Fukase’s imagery, using its inherited language of violence as a means of questioning what has been passed down.

The crow remains the book’s unstable centre. In the childhood photographs, it suggests intimacy and attachment; elsewhere, blurred flight and images of a bird hanging by a rope or pinned beneath a bird of prey return it to the ominous symbolism of turbulent times. The contrast is severe, but the book’s treatment of nostalgia is neither cynical nor sentimental. It is ambivalent, energetic, and cathartic, allowing personal memory, photographic inheritance, and cultural symbolism to remain in productive tension.

For collectors, *Murder* deserves attention as a tightly conceived dialogue between photographs made across generations and between distinct photographic roles: Simoneau’s contemporary work and the earlier family images made by his mother. Its 96-page, paper-bound hardback format with tip-in, accompanied by a bilingual booklet, supports a compact yet layered encounter with the work. The book’s significance lies less in resolving its references than in making violence, intimacy, and remembrance speak to one another without collapsing into a single interpretation.