Since publication of her first mystery, "Shinju," 18 years ago, Laura Joh Rowland has churned out about one book a year.
A Rowland novel is like one of those old Harold Lloyd silent comedies, in which the klutzy star finds himself dangling from a building 12 stories above the street, and then a bird starts pecking his head. After piling on one impossible predicament after the next, Rowland then masterfully extricates him, until it's time for the next nerve-wracking installment.
These cliffhanger scenarios are made possible because Chamberlain Ichiro Sano is subservient to a blooming idiot. And it's true that the fifth Tokugawa shogun, Tsunayoshi (1646-1709), was quite eccentric. Over his three-decade reign he got religion and ordered the feeding and sheltering of some 50,000 dogs in Edo. (He is also believed to have been murdered by his wife, who acted for the good of the country.)