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language: English
country: USA
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, mystery
series: Daidoji Shin Mysteries, #3
dates read: 3.11.22
Josh Reynolds’s The Flower Path is the third of the Daidoji Shin Mysteries, a series of books set in the world of Legend of the Five Rings (my beloved), following the (less) disreputable (than he’d like to believe) Daidoji Shin, the Crane envoy to the contested ground of the City of the Rich Frog. the first two books were by no means groundbreaking but definitely enjoyable; the third book was just. delightful. it’s effectively a locked room mystery set at the theater Shin has been refurbishing(/rebuilding wholesale), on opening night for its first performance under new management — an actress is murdered and Shin has to find the killer.
one of the things I found annoying about the first book was how clearly Shin was a Sherlock Holmes analogue and Kasami, his bodyguard, a Watson analogue, but the second book broke out of the mold and the third book has left it behind. Reynolds does a great job revealing enough information to the reader that it’s possible to follow along with Shin’s reasoning without it ever feeling like the next step in his investigation is obvious. the main characters are a lot of fun — especially Shin himself and Kasami, but also Nao (in his way), who I hope will have continue to be a pov character in future installments.
I was also thoroughly delighted by Shinjo Yasamura, for all that he remains a hereditary aristocrat. someone needs to get him a “bad bisexual rep” t-shirt; I think he’d love it. I probably wouldn’t have spent quite as much time cackling about him if one of the players in the L5R game I’m running weren’t coincidentally bffs with him, but he is and I did. mostly, though, it was just really nice to see Reynolds continue to develop Shin’s sexuality — even if Konomi is (I think) almost certainly the endgame, it’s unambiguously clear now that Shin is not straight. this is one of the nicest things about the new canon books, honestly — clearly Aconyte Books told their writers that they needed to include some lgbtq characters and every single one of them has absolutely run with that. I love it.
the other highlights of this book were the further development of the series’s interest in class and hierarchy and its treatment of Arban, an Ujik bodyguard. it’s been clear since the beginning that Shin’s perspective on core elements of Rokugani society is unconventional, and that comes out clearly here — so much of the novel serves as a reminder (to Shin and to readers) that commoners’ lives are as complex and important as aristocrats’; even Shin, who’s more conscious of this than most of his fellow aristocrats, sometimes loses sight of this. Arban, likewise, is a sharp (and fun!) reminder of the limits of any society’s perspective on itself. “Your people have made cruelty into an art,” he says of Rokugan, and he is SO right.
moods: lighthearted, mysterious, tense