The Fire Kimono (Sano Ichiro Series #13)

by Laura Joh Rowland

Overview

The Fire Kimono is another dazzling historical mystery set in feudal Japan from acclaimed author Laura Joh Rowland.

Japan, March 1700. The strife between Sano Ichiro, the samurai detective who has risen to power in the shogun's court, and his enemies has escalated to the brink of war.

When a long-buried skeleton with mysterious links to the shogun suddenly comes to light, Sano and his wife, Reiko, who defies social conventions by joining in his investigations, must confront dangerous secrets. What was Sano's own mother doing on the night when a burning kimono ignited a blaze that nearly destroyed the city? The shogun gives Sano and Reiko just three days to find out—or risk losing not only their position at court but their families' lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312588861
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/29/2009
Series:	Sano Ichiro Series , #13
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

LAURA JOH ROWLAND is the author of the Sano Ichiro mysteries (Shinju, Bundori, and The Way of the Traitor), which have twice been named Best Mysteries of the Year by Publishers Weekly. She lived through a natural disaster when Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed her house in New Orleans, and now lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Pure entertainment...it takes us to an exotic time and place and overwhelms us with intrigue, romance, adventure and frequent bloodshed” —The Washington Post

“Outstanding...Rowland has given her hero his greatest challenge yet in this suspenseful look at feudal Japan.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An exciting and enthralling story set in a vividly rendered setting. I was captured by it from the moment a Shinto priest, buffeted by winds, his robe flapping 'like a swan in mad flight,' discovers those buried remains heaved from the earth.” —The Boston Globe

“The historic setting is mesmerizing. Great escape fiction. ” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

A toppled tree exposes the bones of a boy murdered 43 years earlier in the heat of the great 17th-century fire that leveled Edo, the huge predecessor to Tokyo.

Returning to the familiar Japan of her long-running samurai saga after a side trip to 19th-century England, Rowland (The Snow Empress, 2007, etc.) drops her readers in the midst of red-hot court intrigue. Beautiful, clever, part-time detective Reiko's palanquin is attacked in the streets by men wearing the badge of her husband Sano Ichiro's arch rival Lord Matsudaira. Within a short time Matsudaira's household is bombed by men seemingly in the employ of Sano, the brilliant former policeman who has worked his way to the right hand of the Shogun. Sano and Matsudaira are indeed at each others' throats, but privately, out of sight of the boss and his boyfriend. The attacks have been masterminded by someone outside the Shogun's household. Before things are sorted out, the rivals are summoned to court where the Shogun announces the discovery of the bones of his long dead young kinsman Tokugawa Tadadoshi, and he orders Sano to get to the bottom of the murder. Sano's investigation is hampered from the beginning by the deadly competition with Matsudaira. It then becomes a catastrophe when evidence points to Sano's mother Etsuko as the prime suspect. Sano and Reiko work separately to reveal the aristocratic and very romantic past at the heart of a love triangle that Etsuko has kept hidden from her son, as well as her involvement in the household of the murdered youth. The secrets, which lie in the chaos of the burning of Edo 43 years earlier, must come out if Etsuko is to avoid execution, but Sano's frantic sleuthing runs constantlyup against the machinations of an old and exiled enemy.

Far from being distracting, the historic setting is mesmerizing. Great escape fiction.

Kirkus Reviews