Dale Furutani Mystery Collection

Dale Furutani Books

Kill the Shogun : A Samurai Mystery by Dale Furutani

Amazon.com
Dale Furutani's Samurai Mystery Trilogy concludes with Kill the Shogun. In this book Matsuyama Kaze takes up his unfinished business from the previous adventures (Death at the Crossroads, Jade Palace Vendetta)--finding the daughter of his former patrons, his lord and lady who were massacred in the intrigues that attended an earlier change in the fortunes of Japan's 17th-century ruling class. Journeying to the capital of the new Japan, Edo, Kaze is catapulted once again into political intrigue when he is mistakenly identified as the would-be assassin of Tokugawa Iesyasu, the new Shogun.
As adept at disguise as he is at swordplay and as clever a reader of the mysteries of his enemies' minds as he is a private seeker of an ennobled spirituality, Kaze is a superhero who defeats the forces ranged against him by employing not only his own extraordinary physical and mental abilities, but the strength of his opponents as well. There's plenty of swordplay, including a fight with a band of ninjas, contract killers for one of the Shogun's rivals. There's also lots of palace intrigue and nicely rendered secondary characters, including a pair of peasants with theatrical ambitions, a young woman who's smitten by the Samurai, and, of course, the object of Kaze's quest, whom he manages to extricate from a brothel in the nick of time. Furutani makes a rarely evoked period come alive, with its distinctive mores, society, and class structure. If you haven't read the earlier books in this series, you'll probably want to when you've finished the concluding volume.

Death at the Crossroads by Dale Furutani

Matsuyama Kaze is a ronin, or masterless samurai. Kaze must travel across Japan until he fulfills a promise made to his dying Lord and Lady - to find their nine-year-old daughter. Not satisfied with the conclusions of local officials, he sets out to solve the crime himself. Kaze stumbles upon a corpse shot with an arrow at the crossroads leading to a small town. He soon becomes embroiled with an unlikely - and untrustworthy - cast of characters as colorful as they are crafty. Each has secrets to keep and axes to grind, and it will take all of Kaze's subtlety, stealth and samurai skills to unravel the mystery and unmask the killer.

The Toyotomi Blades by Dale Furutani

When Ken Tanaka is flown to Tokyo to be interviewed about his role in solving a crime in California, the trip is transformed from one of pleasure to one of intrigue. He quickly becomes embroiled in a mystery surrounding his samurai sword. The sword, which he bought at a garage sale, turns out to be a rare, 17th-century artifact that is somehow connected to the Toyotomi clan. Now, Ken must try to fend off the yakuza who are trailing him while he simultaneously tries to unravel the mystery behind the sword.

Death in Little Tokyo by Dale Furutani

Amazon.com
Ken Tanaka isn't a real P.I., but when he poses as one for his weekend mystery club--printing up phony business cards, renting a storefront office, buying a trench coat and fedora--he gets some real business in the form of Rita Newly, who offers him $500 to help extricate her from a blackmail scheme. Unemployed and with too much time on his hands, Ken can't resist the prospect of adventure or cash. He takes the case, only to find himself the prime suspect when a member of the Japanese mafia turns up dead and in several pieces. To exonerate himself, Ken must find the real killer, and his inexpert gumshoeing tangles him in a complicated plot involving strippers, gangsters, and the World War II-era Japanese "relocation" camps.
The Anthony Award-winning Death in Little Tokyo introduces "the very first Japanese-American amateur sleuth mystery series written by a Japanese-American." Ken Tanaka is a welcome addition; he's likable, charming, nerdish, and unfailingly polite around old people and the police. He has a gently self-effacing sense of humor and a girlfriend, Mariko, who is an actress struggling against the lack of parts for Asian Americans. Set in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo, the mystery unfolds around interesting little lessons on subjects as wide-ranging as woodblock prints, Latino culture, the game of Go, Japanese American history and social ritual, and the intricacies of plotting a mystery weekend. The city and neighborhood are evoked in especially vivid detail; food, in particular, is lovingly described. This is the commendable debut of a refreshing, somewhat less-than-gritty new voice.

A Clear Conscience by Frances Fyfield

Helen West, Crown prosecutor in domestic violence court, is working up a good case of burnout: justice-by-the-book doesn't seem to be working for the women she represents. Plus, Helen's love affair with Police Superintendent Geoffrey Bailey is losing its fire. Things suddenly heat up when Helen learns that humble Cath, her cleaning woman, is being beaten by her husband. Cath has no family-her beautiful brother, Damien, has recently been brutally murdered-and needs all the help she can get. But as the truth of Cath's young life, marriage, and her brother's murder begin to take shape, help and justice seem hard to come by . . . and may prove forever beyond reach.

Perfectly Pure and Good by Frances Fyfield

Sarah Fortune's name belies her recent life. A beautiful red-haired attorney, she's still recovering from a macabre attack by a now-deceased client, Charles Tysall, who became obsessed with her. Now the senior partner in her firm has asked her to travel to the seaside town of Merton to sort out a legacy left to the feuding Pardoe family. It is the same town where Tysall spent his summer holidays.

Sarah arrives in Merton to find there is more to sort out than the huge, convoluted estate. And as she moves closer to the heart of the Pardoe family secrets, she also moves toward a confrontation with a tall, white-haired vagrant who has begun to haunt the quay--a malevolent and cunning "ghost" out of Sarah's own past.

Undercurrents by Frances Fyfield

Undercurrents blends the best of Minette Walters and Daphne du Maurier with an alluring mystique to create a haunting and unforgettable book that is uniquely Fyfield. For twenty years Henry Evans has been haunted by a blurred but shining memory of his lost love, Francesca Chisholm. Now this shy American has come looking for her, in her hometown on the English coast. What he finds there, is not what he expects....

Without Consent by Frances Fyfield

Amazon.com
Helen West is the Crown prosecutor in charge of an ambiguous rape case in Frances Fyfield's absorbing mystery, Without Consent. The victims are, without exception, emotionally needy women; the rapes are humiliating, occasionally even deadly; and the evidence seems to point to a police officer who is a friend of Helen's fiancé, also a policeman. In the course of prosecuting her case, Helen must come to terms with both the legal challenges of proving rape and the subtle implications of sex, dominance, and submission--even between consulting adults. Well-crafted and uncomfortable, Without Consent will stay with you long after the last page is read.

Staring at the Light by Frances Fyfield

Amazon.com
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief? Well, perhaps not, but the array of characters Frances Fyfield collects in Staring at the Light are equally varied: lawyer, dentist, IRA bomber, artist, nun....
A maverick London lawyer, Sarah Fortune finds herself protecting Cannon Smith, a talented artist with a prison record, a wife he loves deeply, and an unfortunate handicap: a twin brother, Johnny, whose need to believe that he is the most important figure in Cannon's life sails effortlessly beyond the threshold of mental health and into psychopathy. Long ago, the brothers were inseparable, but now they've taken different paths--and Johnny doesn't like that at all. He is determined to bring Cannon back to him, and no one is exempt from playing a pawn in his murderous game: not Sarah; not her Aunt Pauline, a nun who is sheltering Cannon's terrified wife; not William Dalrymple, one of Sarah's eccentric retinue of lovers and a dentist whose chair becomes a horrific centerpiece that will make most readers remember Marathon Man shudderingly.

Sarah's blithe, brittle independence is her hallmark: "She was perfectly comfortable living alone with her inexplicable devotions.... She seemed to have turned into a bit of a gypsy, encumbered with a small mortgage and very little else, her ambitions lessening with each succeeding year." But whereas Sara Paretsky's very insistence on V.I. Warshawski's wise-cracking solitude, for example, paradoxically signals that those still waters run as deep as Lake Michigan, Fyfield's determination to turn her heroine into a lone London gun merely renders Sarah as a two-dimensional woman with a commitment phobia.

The novel does, however, possess more than its fair share of vibrant, subtly sketched characters. Cannon Smith, trapped by memories of his own loyalty, must realize that even the most desperate efforts to achieve happiness may fall silently short: "There was not really anywhere to hide. From a ghost. A legend he no longer quite knew. From his own heart and the lure of destruction. From his own nature. From a world where he still did not understand the rules." And William Dalrymple, in his halting attempts to escape his personal and professional failings, and his terrified retreats into the comforting solitude of plaster molds and porcelain veneers, is a figure of ineffable pathos and shy courage. Fyfield's skill may even convince you that Willy Loman has thrown over sales in favor of dentistry, putting down his traveling case for good and picking up a drill and scalpel in its place.

Shadow Play by Frances Fyfield

In Shadow Play, Frances Fyfield hones her powers of writerly suspense to give us a sophisticated, psychologically gripping tale about crimes of the most twisted passions.
The odd, vaguely menacing little man called Mr. Logo is a familiar figure in the old court building in London. Although frequently brought before the magistrate for indecent assault, he is invariably acquitted due to lack of evidence. He is especially familiar to Helen West, the take-no- prisoners Crown Prosecutor who has just failed for the fifth time to prosecute him. Now he is off-limits to her until his next appearance in court. Yet, when she befriends Rose, the young, compulsively secretive and promiscuous clerk in the office, Helen West unwittingly sets in motion events that will dangerously complicate her connection to Mr. Logo and push his rage and dark passion to lethal extremes.

OxfordBooks.com / Oxford, MS

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