Late spring settles over Edo with a deceptive gentleness - soft rain, a drifting haze, the first warmth of summer. But it is not only fallen blossom that gathers in the streets and woodland of Edo city - there too a terrible villainy lies hidden.

When the fearless swordswoman Mifuyu returns to her secluded lodging, her long-awaited repose is shattered- while she rests one day, a group of intruders slip into the house with violent intent. Their attack is as swift and silent as it is inexplicable - and it takes all of her skill to beat them back. Her friend and ally Daijiro soon discovers that the men were not common burglars, but mysterious ronin hunting a ghost from the house's past. What starts as a puzzling intrusion soon draws him and his father into a tangle of shifting identities, forgotten residents, and shadowy figures whose motives dissolve like mist in the morning light. . .

In The Man in the Mist, the brilliant third instalment in Shotaro Ikenami's masterful Samurai Detectives series, mystery, swordplay, and human drama entwine to illuminate the secrets of one the most bewitching periods in Japanese history.