Sano Ichiro
16 primary works • 19 total works
Book 4
Amid the political machinations of feudal Japan, Sano faces a daunting, complex investigation.
Twenty months spent as the shogun's most honourable investigator of events, situations and people have left Sano weary. He looks forward to the comforts of his arranged marriage and month's holiday to celebrate the union with his new wife. However, the death of the shogun's favourite concubine interrupts the couple's wedding ceremony as Sano is recalled to perform his duty.
After Sano traces the cause of Lady Harume's death to a self-inflicted tattoo, his must travel into the cloistered world of the shogun's women to untangle the complicated web of Harume's lovers, rivals and troubled past, and identify her killer.
Book 5
Book 5
Book 6
Book 7
Book 8
Book 9
November 1694. The streets of Edo are erupting in violence as two factions struggle for control over the ruling Tokugawa regime. One is led by the shogun's cousin, Lord Matsudaira, and the other by the shogun's second-in-command, Chamberlain Yanagisawa. Each side pressures Sano Ichiro, the shogun's most honorable investigator, to join its ranks.
When one of the shogun's most trusted advisers is found dead, Sano is forced to honor a posthumous request for a murder investigation. Senior Elder Makino believed that his death would be the result of assassination rather than natural causes. Although he and Sano were bitter enemies, Makino knew that the incorruptible Sano would be duty-bound to oblige his final wish.
Under the watchful eyes and thinly veiled threats of both Lord Matsudaira and Chamberlain Yanagisawa, Sano moves with caution. Each is eager to implicate the other in Makino's death. Sano must discover whether the death was indeed murder, and if so, whether it was motivated by politics, love, or sex. The discovery of secret alliances, both romantic and military, further complicates matters. Sano's investigation has barely begun when violent death claims another of the shogun's favorites.
With his wife, Reiko, working undercover, Sano and his chief retainer, Hirata, must not only investigate multiple deaths, but stem the tide of an impending civil war, in Laura Joh Rowland's The Perfumed Sleeve.
Book 10
Book 11
Book 12
Book 13
Book 14
A fortress in the sky...
Japan, 1701. A woman is brutally attacked within a bamboo prison as clouds swirl around her head. Meanwhile, at Edo Castle, samurai detective turned chamberlain Sano Ichiro is suspicious of his old rival, Yanagisawa, who has been oddly cooperative since his return from exile.
But just as Yanagisawa's true motives begin to emerge, Sano's estranged uncle comes to him for help: his daughter has disappeared, and he begs Sano and his wife - who once suffered through the kidnapping of their own son - to find her before it is too late.
Book 15
Book 16
Winner of RT Magazine's Reviewers' Choice Award for Best Historical Mystery
In the wake of a terrifying earthquake, Sano Ichiro races to solve a crime that could bring down the shogun's regime
When a massive earthquake devastates Japan in 1703, even the shogun's carefully regulated court is left teetering on the brink of chaos. This is no time for a murder investigation except when a nobleman's daughters are found dead from incense poisoning and their father threatens to topple the regime unless Sano Ichiro tracks down the killer.
As Sano and his wife strive to solve the case in a world that is crumbling around them, Laura Joh Rowland author of one of the "five best historical mystery novels" "(The Wall Street Journal) "brings us her most powerful and evocative thriller set in Feudal Japan yet, "The Incense Game.""
Book 17
Instead, he and his family become the accused and this time, they may not survive the day.
Book 18
As the previously unimaginable death of the shogun seems ever more possible, Sano finds himself at the centre of warring forces that threaten not only his own family but Japan itself.
Seventeenth-century Tokyo is the setting for Rowland's first book in a murder mystery series featuring Sano Ichiro the Senior Police Commander in the district of Edo. Ichiro is a samurai whose academic background puts him at odds with most of his peers.
When beautiful, wealthy Yukiko and low-born artist Noriyoshi are found drowned together in what seems to be a shinju, or ritual double suicide, everyone believes the cause was their forbidden love. Everyone, that is, but Sano Ichiro.
Despite the official verdict and being warned off by his superiors, the shogun's Most Honourable Investigator of Events, Situations and People suspects this double death was not only a tragedy - it was murder. Risking his family's good name and his own life, Sano will search for the killer across every level of society, determined to find answers to a mystery no one else seems to want solved . . .
Brutal murders linked to an ancient betrayal send late 17th-century Tokyo into a panic. They also spell big trouble for the Shogun's special investigator, Sano Ichiro, in this sequel to Rowland's first novel, Shinju.
The killings are made known when the severed heads of the victims are put on public display, in the manner of an ancient custom known as bundori, or war trophy. The victims are descendants of warriors who, more than a century earlier, were involved in the murder of a powerful warlord.
As the killings continue, Sano, though hampered in his investigation by his devotion to the warrior-code of bushido and its precepts of silent obedience and service, suspects three of the most powerful men in the Shogunate, including Chamberlain Yanagisawa. Also complicating Sano's quest for the truth is a female ninja in Yanagisawa's power; aiding it are an eager young officer in the Tokyo police and a quirky old morgue attendant.
