Akitada Mysteries Series

The capital is plagued by unexplained fires, and panic threatens to break out, but Akitada has his own problems to worry about.  His ailing wife expects a child and he loses his job to a political appointee. When he tries to confront the nobleman who is responsible for his dismissal, he ends up suspected of his murder.  With no income and a growing family to support, Akitada desperately plunges into the investigation of this crime and a search for a missing youth, while Tora tracks a gang of young arsonists.  These seemingly unrelated cases converge, and before Akitada can uncover the sinister plot behind the fires, he almost loses his own life and those of his wife and newborn child.

After a posting to the northern provinces, Akitada hurries to the deathbed of his mother in the capital. On the road, he spends the night in a monastery where he sees a painted hell screen.  The realistic depictions of tortured men, women, and children haunt his dreams until he wakes to a scream.  At home, he finds his mother sick and vindictive, and his sisters troubled by personal dilemmas.  He is asked to clear his brother-in-law’s name in a theft, and his younger sister’s lover of a murder charge.  The scream in monastery turns out to be a clue in the murder case, and the hell screen sends him on an investigation of unspeakable crimes in the city.  The dangers lurking there will strike very close to home.  

On a journey to Naniwa to unmask officials who are selling information to pirates, Akitada witnesses the recovery of a body from the river.  The image of the drowned child prostitute follows him as his own problems and disasters multiply.  Someone is sabotaging his investigation. His young clerk disappears, Akitada is attacked by thugs, and armed men brutalize his family in the capital. When Tora joins his master in Naniwa, they both fall into the hands of the pirates and must fight a battle to the death to escape.     Yet ultimately it is the tragic story of the dead girl that will haunt Akitada most.

Still grieving the death of his small son, Akitada risks career, freedom, and family to rescue an abused child from a life of misery.  The search for the boy's family leads to a harrowing story of love, murder, and abandonment.  Meanwhile, his faithful servant Tora loses his new wife to a powerful man who pursues beautiful women and will stop at nothing to posses them.  The trails of both cases lead to the prostitutes and courtesans of the amusement quarter, and murder soon follows.

After the loss of his wife and newborn son, Akitada returns home, ostensibly to care for his motherless children, but really to withdraw from the world into his grief. When his friends and family join in an effort to draw him out of his seclusion by tempting him with a mystery, he responds halfheartedly until he becomes intrigued by the young woman's alleged suicide and the slipshod way in which the police investigated.  But more serious problems arise: he faces dismissal and punishment for having left his last post without permission. Then Tora and Saburo are arrested for the murder of a gambler. Their dilemma forces Akitada to delve into the world of a gangster boss who controls gambling and prostitution, and this time Akitada will not escape.  

Intended to become the emperor's concubine, she died at the bottom of a cliff near Prince Atsuhira's private villa.  The palace covered up the scandal.  Months later, Akitada is drawn into the case when his best friend is accused of treason.  Atsuhira, his alleged co-conspirator, refuses to defend himself. The mystery of the lady's death unravels slowly, bringing danger to Akitada, whose household is already threatened when an ill-fated relationship between Genba and a prostitute leads to his arrest for the brothel keeper's murder.  Surrounded by a cast ranging from outcasts and assassins to noblewomen serving in the inner apartments of the imperial palace, Akitada not only delves into murky palace secrets, but his efforts to solve two murders require him to examine the many roles played by women in his society. 

An unexpected and dubious promotion sends Akitada to Kyushu, an outpost where illegal trade with China breeds treason and murder. Leaving behind his family, he faces obstruction and hostility at his new post and learns his predecessor, a man of expensive tastes, has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. As Tora and Saburo delve into the underworld of Hakata, Akitada tracks a ruthless traitor.  The brutal murder of the Chinese wife of a doll maker sets into motion events that leave a trail of bodies. Worse, as the number of unexplained deaths mounts, Tora also disappears.  Untangling the skeins of intrigue, Akitada follows leads from the seductive attention of a beautiful courtesan to the secretive business world of Chinatown and discovers that doing his duty has an even higher price than expected.

A.D. 1030.  Senior Secretary Sugawara Akitada is recovering from a knife wound and still reeling from the loss of his wife. When the Council of State orders an investigation of the claims of two warring temples, he is sent to Otsu to clear up the matter. As it happens, Akitada's best friend Kosehira is governor there and welcomes Akitada into his large and cheerful family in hopes of healing his mind and body. But almost immediately, the murder of a judge interferes with both the official assignment and the planned relaxation. When other murders follow and the local authorities express endless faith in his skills, Akitada gets on the trail of a serial killer. Meanwhile, the violence simmering among the monks escalates. When Tora is attacked and held by them, Akitada must use his diplomacy to release him, but the incident sends Tora and Saburo on a desperate and dangerous mission in the mountains.  To make matters worse, the lonely Akitada has fallen in love with his friend's nineteen-year-old daughter, an impossible situation that nearly drives him to distraction.

When an imperial princess disappears from the Ise shrine, Akitada, new governor of Mikawa Province, has barely had time to settle there with his family before he is dispatched by imperial order on a secret assignment to find her. The world Akitada finds at Ise turns out to be anything but spiritual. The pilgrimage town is a murky, dangerous place where no one can be trusted and where someone wants him dead. Gangs of robbers work the roads and forests, and two young women are murdered within days of each other. Although Akitada’s mission becomes known, putting his life in jeopardy, he persists with the unlikely help of a dwarf. Meanwhile, Tora and Saburo, left to look after the new province in their master’s absence, get involved in local problems and jeopardize Akitada’s new appointment and his career

Fifteen years after the brutal murder of an imperial prince, the crime casts its shadow on Akitada’s family. The case is cold and the assassin dead, but his young wife’s brother wants to marry the assassin’s daughter, and Akitada is expected to clear his name. Worse, in doing so he must either destroy a friend’s reputation or his own marriage. As Akitada searches for the truth among other suspects and unravels the secrets of the past, he stirs up fresh murder and shatters his own happiness.

From the Shamus Award winning author comes a new mystery set in Imperial Japan. In the autumn of 1033, Sugawara Akitada spends his last year as governor of Mikawa Province amidst reports of piracy and concerns about an uprising. He grieves over his troubled marriage and worries about the murder of the daughter of a local lord. As if things could not be worse, an investigator from the capital arrives to build a case of malfeasance against him, and when he and Tora decide to check into irregularities along the Tokaido highway, they uncover a conspiracy that points to one of Mikawa’s powerful overlords and find themselves in real danger.

The nuns of one of the Nara temples have misplaced an imperial concubine. Concerned about her well-being, the emperor dispatches Akitada to find her. Akitada decides to take along his new wife, hoping to combine a trivial matter with a belated honeymoon. Alas, murder intervenes. An old man dies in the snow. A nun is fished out of an icy river. Another nun is bludgeoned to death. What had looked like a pleasant excursion quickly turns into one of Akitada's most shocking and dangerous cases.

If ever Akitada needed luck, it is now! Things are not going well for him. His new boss is out to get him, his daughter is in love with the wrong man, his ex-wife's affairs come again to haunt him, and he fears he is too old and too poor to deal with any of it. Then his old friend dies suddenly from a case of indigestion that looks suspiciously like murder and the problems escalate into the deadly violence of two ruthless killers. He has to save not only his career and his reputation, but his life.

In this Shamus-Award-winning short story, the young Akitada becomes a detective when a father asks him to find his daughter. To Akitada’s dismay, the young woman has been murdered and the suspect is a convenient peddler. But this seems all wrong, and Akitada persists in his search for the real killer though it involves great risks to himself. 

On a visit to a remote mountain region with his children, Akitada hopes to find some peace after the break-up of his marriage. Instead they become involved almost immediately in the random violence that plagues the peasants of the valley. Farmers are murdered, rice stores are burned, and young girls disappear. The local policeman seems honest, but soon Akitada fears to trust anyone. When his retainer is arrested for murder and his daughter nearly caught by bandits, he fights back. Powerless and far from court, he must confront the ruthless villain behind the crimes.

Murder doesn’t take holidays, and neither does Akitada.  In this small collection of three short stories, Akitada solves crimes on New Year’s Day, during the O-bon festival of the dead, and on the occasion of the Tanabata festival celebrating the meeting of celestial lovers.  As a bonus, a chapter describes the Kamo festival from RASHOMON GATE.  These exotic whodunits mix detection with the customs of a fascinating culture.