Shinju — Laura Joh Rowland

Not since SHOGUN has the lush and exotic world of ancient Japan been revealed in all its rich and fascinating detail. Beautiful, wealthy Yukiko and the lowly artist Nuriyoshi have been found dead, drowned together in a ritual double suicide--or shinju. It is tragic, but these things happen. Only one man is unsatisfied with the official report.

Sano, a newly appointed yoriki, is the closest thing the town of Edo has to a policeman, and he is suspicious of the crime. Disobeying direct orders to stay out of the matter, he pursues elusive answers from the ornate tearooms of the highest born daimyos to the gaudy pleasure-palaces of the lowest classes, from a cloistered convent on a mountaintop to the horrid prisons where death is a blessing. Risking his family's good name and his own neck, Sano must solve a crime that nobody wants solved without rocking his arcane world off the very foundation that keeps it spinning.