It took several years and a lot of you-know-what.

Hint: Paper & Ink, travel to Japan, proofreading, cover design, and professional book formatting all added up.

But it was all worth it.

What the book is about

In 1868, a massive cache of government gold supposedly disappeared from Shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu’s castle. The shōgun’s finance minister reportedly removed the treasure and buried it in northern Japan to keep it out of the hands of the advancing anti-shōgun rebels.

Historians claim the cache never existed. But concurrent with the disappearance of the gold, Tomita Yuki, a loyalist samurai, and Avery Butler, a retired American Union Army officer, embark on a secret mission with almost a ton of gold.  But their mission ends in a disaster. Tomita is forced to return to Japan without the gold, and his story is lost in the fog of Japan’s civil war. Betrayal and bloodshed threaten to bury Tomita’s legacy along with the treasure, but love and devotion will not have it.

Over 150 years later, Parker West, a private investigator, discovers a Japanese diary in his parents’ attic. Jason Tanaka, a historian, translates it, and doing so almost costs them their lives. Their search takes them to many places, and genealogy helps them unravel the mystery, as does kanji, or written Japanese.

     The novel shares fascinating information about the little-known tragedy involving nineteen teenage samurai, Bushido, the way of the warrior, and John Manjiro, the fourteen-year-old ship-wrecked boy who was the first Japanese to visit and live in America. 

The book may be purchased on Amazon in scores of countries. It is also available in Kindle.

Go to AMAZON and type in: The Shogun’s Gold: Piper