Description:
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. --Jane Adams
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