Claws of the Cat: A Shinobi Mystery
Make way for another mystery series set in feudal Japan. Laura Joh Rowland’s Sano Ichiro series has the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries pretty well staked out, and I. J. Parker’s Sugawara Akitada’s beat is the eleventh century. Hiro, the ninja-sleuth in Spann’s debut, lives in the sixteenth century. A samurai is murdered—not just any samurai but also a police officer. The likely culprit, a young teahouse entertainer, claims she didn’t kill the man. But the victim has some highly placed relatives, including his instantly dislikable policeman son, and Hiro wonders if he’ll have enough time to prove the girl’s innocence before the sentence is passed. Hiro is an intriguing character; unlike Ichiro and Akitada, he isn’t an official investigator. However, his ostensible job, as protector to a Jesuit priest, gives him the opportunity to look into the policeman’s murder (while Father Mateo, the priest, serves as a sort of beard and sidekick). Different enough from Rowland’s and Parker’s popular series and set in a mostly untapped period of Japanese history, the book should do well with fans of those writers. --David Pitt