Cold Heart

More dead men.

The young woman samurai Yamabuki faces her greatest test yet. She finds a bit of romance—the mysterious samurai Yoshinaka seems quite smitten with her—but his sister Tomoe is not so welcoming. Yamabuki suspects they're up to something, but it's not clear what, or why this confident pair are here, so far from home. Meanwhile, the crossroads town is crawling with Ōe warriors who are quite agitated that people keep turning up dead.

Meanwhile, on Yamabuki's trail, the lapsed priest turned shinobi assassin hired to kill her, encounters a casualty of her sword work—a man from his past, a man he'd once loved—and suddenly what had been a simple job becomes a mission of personal vengeance.

As tensions rise and swords are drawn, Yamabuki must weigh giri, duty to her clan, against ninjo, human feelings, to decide the path of her life. All that stands in the way of love is a cold heart.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, the brutal reality of samurai life in 12th-century Japan comes to life this full-length 83,000-word novel, Book Three of Sword of the Taka Samurai.