The ninjas illusion, p.1
The Ninja's Illusion, page 1
Praise for the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mysteries
“Charming characters, a hint of romantic conflict, and just the right amount of danger will garner more fans for this cozy series.”
– Publishers Weekly
“With a world-class puzzle to solve and riveting plot twists to unravel, Quicksand had me on the edge of my seat for the entire book...Don’t miss one of the best new mystery series around!”
– Kate Carlisle,
New York Times Bestselling Author of the Bibliophile Mysteries
“A delicious tall tale about a treasure map, magicians, musicians, mysterious ancestors, and a few bad men.”
– Mystery Scene Magazine
“A joy-filled ride of suspenseful action, elaborate scams, and witty dialogue. The villains are as wily as the heroes, and every twist is intelligent and unexpected, ensuring that this is a novel that will delight lovers of history, romance, and elaborate capers.”
– Kings River Life Magazine
“Forget about Indiana Jones. Jaya Jones is swinging into action, using both her mind and wits to solve a mystery...Readers will be ensnared by this entertaining tale.”
– RT Book Reviews (four stars)
“Quicksand has all the ingredients I love—intrigue, witty banter, and a twisty mystery that hopscotches across France!”
– Sara Rosett,
Author of the Ellie Avery Mystery Series
“Pandian’s second entry sets a playful tone yet provides enough twists to keep mystery buffs engaged, too. The author streamlines an intricate plot….[and] brings a dynamic freshness to her cozy.”
– Library Journal
“If Indiana Jones had a sister, it would definitely be historian Jaya Jones.”
— Suspense Magazine
“Has everything a mystery lover could ask for: ghostly presences, Italian aristocrats, jewel thieves, failed actors, sitar players, and magic tricks, not to mention dabs of authentic history and academic skullduggery.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Move over Vicky Bliss and Joan Wilder, historian Jaya Jones is here to stay! Mysterious maps, legendary pirates, and hidden treasure—Jaya’s latest quest is a whirlwind of adventure.”
— Chantelle Aimée Osman,
The Sirens of Suspense
“Pirate Vishnu is fast-paced and fascinating as Jaya’s investigation leads her this time to India and back to her own family’s secrets.”
—Susan C. Shea,
Author of the Dani O’Rourke mysteries
“Pandian’s new series may well captivate a generation of readers, combining the suspenseful, mysterious and romantic. Four stars.”
— RT Book Reviews
“Witty, clever, and twisty… Do you like Agatha Christie? Elizabeth Peters? Then you’re going to love Gigi Pandian.”
— Aaron Elkins,
Edgar Award-Winning Author of the Gideon Oliver Mysteries
“Fans of Elizabeth Peters will adore following along with Jaya Jones and a cast of quirky characters as they pursue a fabled treasure.”
—Juliet Blackwell,
New York Times Bestselling Author of the Art Lover’s Mysteries
The Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Series
by Gigi Pandian
Novels
ARTIFACT (#1)
PIRATE VISHNU (#2)
QUICKSAND (#3)
MICHELANGELO’S GHOST (#4)
THE NINJA’S ILLUSION (#5)
Novellas
FOOL’S GOLD (prequel to ARTIFACT)
(in OTHER PEOPLE’S BAGGAGE)
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Copyright
THE NINJA’S ILLUSION
A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery
Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection
First Edition | October 2017
Henery Press
www.henerypress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Copyright © 2017 by Gigi Pandian
Cover art by Stephanie Savage
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-251-1
Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-252-8
Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-253-5
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-254-2
Printed in the United States of America
To my critique partners—I couldn’t do this without you
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is far from a solitary pursuit. Huge thanks to critique readers Nancy Adams, Stephen Buehler, Adam Gratz, Emberly Nesbitt, Susan Parman, Larissa Reinhart, Brian Selfon, and Susan Spann, and my incredible Henery Press editorial team of Kendel Lynn, Rachel Jackson, and Erin George. And special thanks to two people who believed in this series from the start: my agent Jill Marsal and Malice Domestic Grants Chair Harriette Sackler.
Writing about a historian involves a lot of historical research, including the fun of discovering obscure facts, visiting mysterious locations, and talking with fascinating people. My research for The Ninja’s Illusion benefited from the help of many people, most notably Jacob Pandian, Larissa Reinhart, Susan Spann, Chizuko Goto, and Yuichiro Yamashita. Any mistakes in these pages are my own.
I’m forever grateful for the friends who kept me sane as I wrote this novel. I’m blessed with a wonderful community of more people than I can list individually with the space I have here. I need to at least mention local writers Emberly Nesbitt, Mysti Berry, and Michelle Cruz Gonzales, who keep me going at our café writing dates. Fellow members of the board of Sisters in Crime, who inspire me with all they do for this genre we love. And Diane Vallere, who never blinks an eye when I ask her the silliest questions.
And the reason Jaya got to travel to Japan is James, who first suggested we visit Japan. At the time I had no idea I’d fall in love with both the country and Japanese mystery novels.
Chapter 1
I’m better at finding lost treasures than a phone buried in the bottom of my bag. Handwritten notecards for my lecture. A granola bar squished nearly as thin as a hand-pressed sheet of parchment. A magnifying glass. But no phone.
My students had kept me after class asking questions. Normally having engaged students was a wonderful thing. But not today. The text message I’d received before class told me this was urgent. He’d be calling any minute now.
I rushed through the building, hoping I didn’t crash into any of the students who filled the hallway. With only two days to go before a week off for Thanksgiving break, a flurry of academic activity was keeping us busy. I wanted to answer the call privately inside my office, but this was taking too long. He was a stickler for promptness. Accurate timing meant the difference between life and death in his act.
I stopped next to a corkboard adorned with colorful flyers and rooted through my bag. A light from my phone illuminated the depths of the cavernous red messenger bag. I smiled as I saw the face of my best friend on the screen. In the photo, his thick black hair was partially obscured by his bowler hat, and a mischievous smile hovered on his lips.
“How goes it, Houdini?” I said as I answered the video call. I thought that would get a smile out of him. I never called him by his stage name, The Hindi Houdini.
“Don’t get on the flight, Jaya,” Sanjay said. “Don’t come to Japan.”
I stared back at the video image on the small screen, my smile wavering. “What are you talking about? I’ve got my ticket for the day after tomorrow.”
“There’s something—” He stopped speaking and glanced nervously over his shoulder. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “There’s something odd going on here. You’re not going to believe me, but I’m serious. Someone is—”
His voice broke off in the middle of the sentence. The screen went dark.
“Sanjay?” I said to a blank screen.
I tried calling him back as I walked to my office. He didn’t answer.
Seeing the scowl on my face, the undergraduate students in the hallway parted to let me pass. Surely it was just a dropped signal. Sanjay was on the other side of the world from San Francisco, after all. But what had he been trying to tell me?
“Lecture bombed?” a voice next to me asked.
I jumped and dropped the phone. Why was I so shaken by Sanjay’s call? He made his living as a performer. He was bound to be dramatic. I told myself that’s all it was. But that look on his face…It was difficult to believe the rational part of my brain.
“No,” I said, picking up the phone. “Class went great.”
“If this is what you look like after a good lecture,” Tamarind sa
id, “I’d hate to see you when a class goes badly. Your face is pale. Good thing I brought caffeine.” The librarian smiled as she held up two paper cups of coffee, their lids covered in raindrops.
Tamarind Ortega had been hired at the university library two years before, after completing her Library Science Master’s degree. She was a brilliant librarian who knew how to track down even the most obscure information, but the library staff also appreciated her size and temperament. Big-boned with clothing that indicated she was not to be messed with, the post-feminist post-punk was five feet ten inches of tough love. Our university was in the heart of San Francisco, and colorful characters who weren’t students would sometimes wander into the library. Tamarind was great at relating to people the other librarians didn’t want to deal with, and she wasn’t afraid of using her strength and size as an implicit threat if disruptive people didn’t leave the library. We met shortly after I got my job as an assistant professor. As two women starting out in academia who didn’t fit conventional expectations, we’d quickly become friends.
I unlocked the door to my office. My six-foot Ganesha statue and his broken tusk greeted us. I’d fallen in love with the statue in a craftsman’s workshop in Kochi, India. Lane Peters, the man whose presence never failed to make me feel more alive, had noticed my reaction to it and bought it for me. Tamarind handed me one of the coffees and set the other in front of Ganesha. I’d told her repeatedly it wasn’t necessary, but she said it couldn’t hurt.
“It’s not the lecture,” I said as I looked for a safe spot on my cluttered desk to set the coffee. “I’m distracted. Sanjay called me for a video chat, but we got disconnected.”
“Bummer. I’m sure he’ll call you back when he gets a signal.”
The phone was still clasped in my hand. I willed Sanjay to call me back. What had he seen over his shoulder?
“Let me try him one more time.” I deposited my bag underneath the messy desk and tried him again. I once again failed to reach him. I flopped dejectedly into the desk chair. It squeaked more miserably than usual, as if commiserating.
“Spill,” Tamarind said. “What’s going on?”
What was going on? I took a sip of coffee to give myself a moment to gather my thoughts. I smiled at Tamarind. “You remembered I like four sugars.”
“Oops. I put in six. Hey, stop avoiding the question. Spill.”
I looked out my small sliver of a window at the gray sky and misty rain. “You know Sanjay is performing as the opening act in an Indian Rope Trick show in Kyoto next week. The fabled illusion that’s supposedly impossible.”
Sanjay was a professional stage magician—an incredibly successful one. Performing as The Hindi Houdini, he’d been doing his show at a theater in the Napa Valley until a California wildfire last summer had burned the theater to the ground. He didn’t have a backup plan, so after the theater where he’d established his career was destroyed, he didn’t know what to do with himself. An invitation from Akira, Japan’s most famous stage magician, came at the perfect time. Sanjay was aimless and vulnerable. The controversial magician who claimed to perform real miracles had swept in to take advantage of the situation to fill a hole in his new show. With a much more scrupulous magician friend in Japan, Sanjay could have been doing a show where the theatrics remained on the stage. Unfortunately, his friend Hiro’s career wasn’t doing nearly as well as Akira’s, so Hiro hadn’t been the one to extend an offer.
Tamarind nodded. “That’s old news, Jaya. Why do you look so freaked out about it?”
“Sanjay texted me earlier, saying he needed to tell me something urgent. When he called, he said something ‘odd’ was going on.” Goosebumps swept over my arms as I remembered Sanjay’s face. “He told me not to come to Japan.”
“Shut. Up. Why would he say that?”
I bit my lip. “He looked over his shoulder…and the connection went dead.” I gripped the paper coffee cup so hard that coffee splashed onto a stack of papers.
“Seriously?” Tamarind gaped at me as she tossed me a box of tissues from my bookshelf. “Of course you’re serious. You don’t have that kind of sense of humor. But Sanjay does. He’s messing with you. I’m all for pulling a good practical joke on one’s friends, but if he could see how tense he’s making you, he’d call you back.”
“This isn’t a joke. It’s not only what he said to me today. Sanjay was desperate to sign onto this gig, but it made him uneasy. Something has been weighing on him since the first time Akira contacted him. But he wouldn’t talk about it.”
That, I realized, was why Sanjay’s dropped call had been so unsettling. He was already nervous about something. Something he wasn’t telling me.
“Because of Akira’s reputation as someone who possesses real supernatural powers?” Tamarind asked.
“That’s part of it. Akira cons people into believing he performs real miracles. But Sanjay already knew that about him when he signed on. Something changed.”
“Let’s ask my assistant.” Tamarind enunciated as she spoke into her phone. “What has Japanese magician Akira done this week?” She frowned at her phone and shook her head. “No public scandals to speak of. Oh, but here’s something worth our time.”
Tamarind grinned as the sound of a Japanese pop song filled my office. She held up a music video with four teenage boys dancing on a stage and thousands of fans in a stadium audience.
“There’s so much happening on this screen right now,” I said, “I think I might have a seizure.” Small rectangles with additional videos played in both the top left and lower right corners of the screen, in addition to text that scrolled across the bottom.
“That’s the norm with Japanese television. It engages all the senses. But I don’t know how you can look at anything else besides that beautiful face of his. Akira is the one with silky-smooth long hair.”
“He looks like he’s sixteen.”
“This video is from more than a decade ago. So my reaction is totally age appropriate. I’m not really into J-pop, though, so I don’t know the story of why the boy band broke up. But that’s when Akira became a magician.”
“Sanjay told me how it took Akira a while to make it as a magician. Challenging starts to their magic careers is one thing they have in common.”
“Sanjay never had an accident like Akira’s, though.”
“What accident?”
Tamarind began dancing to the catchy song. I took the phone and silenced it.
She sighed. “Sanjay didn’t tell you?”
I shook my head.
“All I know,” Tamarind said, “is that a few years ago, Akira nearly died. It was an accident in his show—and it looked like he was dead. The press initially thought it was a publicity stunt, but when it took him a whole year to recover, and he returned with a crippled hand, everyone realized it wasn’t. He lost the use of his left hand, but he gained something else. He came back with the power to perform miracles.”
“He doesn’t really perform miracles.”
Tamarind shrugged. “He’s much more famous now. And he has legions of fans who believe he does.”
“I know. And that’s how he claims he’s going to pull off performing the ‘impossible’ Indian Rope Trick. I don’t understand how Sanjay convinced himself it was okay to work with Akira.”
“Sure you do.”
“I do?”
“Ambition, Jaya. That hunky best pal of yours has got more of it than anyone I know.”
“I know Sanjay is ambitious,” I said. “I wouldn’t be so worried if that’s all it was.”
What was so dire that had him looking over his shoulder and telling me not to join him in Japan? Sanjay had escaped from a coffin sinking to the bottom of the Ganges. He’d kept his wits when there was a mishap during a stunt where he was buried alive. I’d never seen him nervous about a performance.
