The Kubizuka Case - Hale Knight

Japan is falling apart. A puppet Emperor. Warlords at each other's throats. And somewhere in the northern fog, the dead are walking.

Inspector Kenshi investigates crimes for the imperial court. He is methodical, precise, and privately devastated - his wife Yuki was murdered twelve months ago, her hands folded by someone who was in no hurry. He has not cried since. He has not stopped working since.

The difference is that Yuki still talks to him.

When a lord's entire wedding feast is found dead - blue-lipped, cups still raised - Kenshi is dispatched to investigate. What begins as a poisoning case opens into something far older and far worse: a decapitated warlord whose head refused to decompose, a cult three centuries in the making, and a resurrection that will tear the empire apart if Kenshi cannot find the thread in time.

The thread leads back to Yuki. To what she knew. To why she was silenced.

The Kubizuka Case is a feudal Japanese detective novel with the cold precision of Sherlock Holmes, the dark mythological sweep of a Kurosawa epic, and a ghost wife who is smarter than everyone in the room.