Laura Joh Rowland

Laura Joh Rowland is an American author of historical mysteries whose fiction spans feudal Japan and Victorian Britain. She holds degrees in science and public health from the University of Michigan and previously worked as an aerospace scientist before becoming a full-time novelist. She is also a painter and comics artist and lives in New York City.

Rowland is best known for the Sano Ichiro series, beginning with Shinju, which follows a samurai investigator serving the Tokugawa shogunate in seventeenth-century Japan. The novels combine murder investigations with court politics, factional rivalry, family conflict and the rigid social obligations of samurai society. She has also written historical suspense novels featuring Charlotte Brontë and the Sarah Bain mysteries, centred on a photographer investigating crimes in Victorian London. Her work has been published internationally and has received nominations and recognition from several major mystery organisations and publications.

Periods and events

Tokugawa Period Victorian Crime and Sensation Culture Victorian Spiritualism and Psychical Culture

Series

Series by Laura Joh Rowland (2 series)

Sano Ichiro Novels in Order

The Iris Fan

4.4

Victorian Mysteries in Order

by Laura Joh Rowland 7 books 3.9

The Victorian Mysteries follow photographer Sarah Bain and her unconventional investigative partners through London from the Whitechapel murders of 1888 to the Thames torso case of 1891. Sarah’s camera gives the group access to crime scenes and evidence at a time when forensic photography, popular newspapers and criminal…