On New Year’s Eve, 1941, just three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were bombing the Philippine capital of Manila, where journalists Mel and Annalee Jacoby had married just a month earlier. The couple had worked in China as members of a tight community of foreign correspondents with close ties to Chinese leaders; if captured by invading Japanese troops, they were certain to be executed. Racing to the docks just before midnight, they barely escaped on a freighter—the beginning of a tumultuous journey that would take them from one island outpost to another.

The Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria

Samurai sleuth Sano Ichiro has a very personal motive in determining who killed the shogun's heir apparent with a hairpin: he's trying to save himself from being executed for the crime.