The Samurai's Daughter

New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2003. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. viii, [2], 304, [4] pages. Cast of Characters. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Sujata Massey is a mystery writer born 1964 in Sussex, England who emigrated to the United States at the age of 5. She attended Johns Hopkins University graduating in 1986 and worked on the Baltimore Evening Sun. She is best known for her series featuring Rei Shimura, a Californian born to a Japanese father and an American mother. Many of her novels are set in Japan and in Washington, D.C. She has also written a new historical suspense series called The Daughters of Bengal. The first book in the series is The Sleeping Dictionary and is set in British India between 1930 and 1947. In this novel, a ten-year-old peasant girl, Pom, orphaned by a cyclone, undertakes an odyssey through colonial Bengal in order to survive. With literacy skills, social intelligence and charm, she moves from servitude at a girls' boarding school in Midnapore to a pleasure house in Kharagpur, eventually reaching Calcutta where she becomes involved in the Indian freedom movement during World War II. Other novels in the Daughters of Bengal historical fiction series will feature Pom's descendants in newly independent India. Antiques dealer Rei Shimura is in San Francisco visiting her parents and researching a personal project tracing the story of 100 years of Japanese decorative arts through her own family's experience. Her work is interrupted by the arrival of her boyfriend, lawyer Hugh Glendinning, who is involved in a class action lawsuit on behalf of aged Asian nationals forced to engage in slave labor for Japanese companies during World War II. These two projects suddenly intertwine when one of Hugh's clients is murdered and Rei begins to uncover unsavory facts about her own family's actions during the war. Rei unravels the truth, finds the killer, and at the same time learns about family ties and loyalty and the universal desire to avoid blame.