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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, mystery
series: Daidoji Shin Mysteries, #5
dates read: 2.6.26-3.6.26
Josh Reynolds’s A Bitter Taste seems to be — alas — the final book of the Daidoji Shin Mysteries; Aconyte has only published two new L5R novels in the last two years, the most recent of which is by Reynolds but not about Shin, which I take to mean the series is over. it is, fortunately, a fitting conclusion to the series, unraveling many — though not all! — of the plots in which Shin has found himself entangled over the preceding four books.
Shin has lately been under investigation by a Crane Clan auditor — at least notionally representing his family’s interests — only for the auditor to be found dead in a shoyu brewery operated by a man with a grudge against Shin. suddenly, Shin finds himself suspected of murder. on the back foot, he has to attempt to solve the murder and exonerate himself while staying one step ahead of both the Crane (who are trying to drag him home to be married), the external investigator Kitsuki Ko (who happens to be Shin’s ex-fiancée), and the real murderers.
as with the rest of the series, I had a lot of fun with this! Reynolds is good at writing mystery and at balancing guiding the reader towards the solution with keeping the doors open to multiple possibilities. while I still had one of the conspirators on my mental list of suspects, I was still surprised by aspects of the climax, and I think the resolution did a good job of both being a satisfying end to the series and leaving some threads untied in case Reynolds ever got to do more with the character.
while — sadly — the Ujik bodyguard introduced in The Flower Path only has a cameo here, the book does nonetheless continue to point readers towards the profound inequalities that structure Rokugani society. if — in keeping with the structure of detective and thriller fiction — it ends with a reiteration of existing social structures, it is nonetheless an at least mildly unsettled one. the system, Shin admits, is flawed; if he regards his adversaries’ actions as mistakes, the error in some ways, from Shin’s perspective, seems to be a tactical one, rather than an error of their fundamental principles. this is, to be sure, a privileged position, but it does nonetheless open the door to an interrogation of the society Shin has found himself in the position of defending.
its politics aside, my main critique of the novel — aside from the editorial inconsistency with regards to a side character’s name, sometimes given as “Taoka” and sometimes as “Taoko”, with about equal frequency — would just be that there are a lot of threads to be tied together, and while I found the overall trajectory satisfying there were definitely some aspects of the plot that got short shrift — the theater troupe, for example. (I also was, frankly, struggling a bit to dredge up what happened in books 1 and 2, but that’s really just because it’s been so long since I read them — there was, in any case, enough here to jog my memory that I was still able to engage with and enjoy the resolution even if I was vague on some of the details.)
Shin remains a very fun character — and, as I observed in my review of The Market of 100 Fortunes, I think the series as a whole are maybe the best of the new canon novels for giving readers a sense of how the world works, in the form of the layers of politics, hierarchy, and social propriety that govern it. at the same time, Shin’s nonconformism gives the books the freedom to play with all of these elements of the setting, to push boundaries, and generally to just get a little silly with it. it’s a good vibe!
moods: adventurous, dark, mysterious, tense