The Ninja's Daughter

June 20, 2016
At the start of Spann’s fine fourth whodunit set in 16th-century Japan (after 2015’s Flask of the Drunken Master), Fr. Mateo Ávila de Santos, a Portuguese priest who has been living in Kyoto, and Hattori Hiro, a ninja spy and assassin who was hired anonymously to protect Mateo, are roused in the middle of the night by Jiro, a merchant’s apprentice. Jiro fears that he’s responsible for the strangulation murder of Emi, a teahouse girl, with whom he was sitting by the Kamo River when he passed out. When he woke up, she was dead. Emi’s status as an actor’s child makes her, in the eyes of the law, a nonperson whose death doesn’t call for any investigation. Mateo and Hiro’s inquiry plays out against political turmoil at the highest levels after the alleged suicide of the former shogun. While not at the level of the best of Laura Joh Rowland’s series set in Japan a century later, this entry is an improvement over Spann’s earlier installments. Agent: Sandra Bond, Bond Literary Agency.

June 1, 2016
A 16th-century ninja and priest make an oddly effective pair of sleuths.Kyoto has become ever more dangerous since the death of the shogun and the seizure of the city by the warlord Matsunaga Hisahide. Hattori Hiro, a highly trained shinobi assassin posing as a translator, has been hired to protect Father Mateo, a Portuguese priest tending to the poor. Jiro, a young man apprenticed to a rice merchant, begs the priest to help him when he awakens after a night of drinking to find the dead body of a girl he knows beside him on a riverbank. The young woman is Emi, the daughter of an actor, according to Japanese law, a person of no status whose death is not worth investigating. Father Mateo is horrified, and once Hiro learns that Emi's father, Satsu, is really Hiro's uncle and a shinobi in disguise, he's willing to help as long as the investigation doesn't endanger the priest. Emi, unlike her plain and obedient sister, Chou, was unwilling to marry and wanted to become a teahouse entertainer but had been unable to find anyone to train her. The murder weapon was a leather thong that held a gold coin; anyone who could afford to give Emi that coin must be suspect in her death. But there are plenty of other suspects, including Chou's betrothed, an actor Emi seduced. A danger to them all is Yoriki Hosokawa, an assistant magistrate who yearns for higher status and resorts to blackmail for the money he requires. Hiro has been warned that they're marked for death if they don't leave the city soon, but Father Mateo is determined to know the truth before they leave. Since everyone in the case is telling lies, it's good that both Hiro and the priest are practiced at unmasking deceit. The fourth in this entertaining series (Flask of the Drunken Master, 2015, etc.) is a nicely balanced combination of mystery, political machinations, and Japanese customs.

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July 1, 2016
Japan 1565. A young man thinks he might have killed a girl; he's a little fuzzy on the details, but when he went to sleep, she was alive; and when he awoke, she wasn't. He confesses his (apparent) crime to ninja assassin Hiro Hattori and Portuguese Jesuit priest Father Mateothis is the fourth in Spann's Shinobi seriesand Father Mateo immediately suspects something else is going on, that the young man might have been framed. Hiro, on the other hand, knows the dead girl's family, and honor demands he avenge her death. This isn't the only mystery series set in feudal Japan (there's Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro series, for example, and I. J. Parker's Sugawara Akitada novels), but Spann sets hers apart by using a distinctly modern-sounding writing style, with contemporary phrasing and idiom. This may bother purists, but for those willing to go with the premise of a book written in sixteenth-century Japan but translated into contemporary English, the result is a compelling tale engagingly told.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)