I received an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and publisher Pushkin Press in exchange for an honest review. Will you get it right? I certainly didn't.
This novel is a twice over whodunnit with a brilliant ending, join the mystery club as they hypothesise over the means, motive and murdered in the case of their own deaths. Definitely a new direction for me, all my previous experience of Japanese fiction had been in the fantasy genre. The Decagon House Murders was first published in the 80s and I received an ARC of the 2021 publication translated from Japanese. I enjoyed the remote island setting of the book, it has only one building, one ruin and no means of communication or escape to the mainland- perfect for creating and maintaining tension. They don't even seem to particularly like one another and are in constant competition as to whom is most intelligent, though their exchanges of Japanese myths were interesting. I have to say I wasn't particularly endeared to any of the mystery club members, all of them pompous literature students -going by literary nicknames- trying to one up eachother. Now there are mystery club members at the site of the family murder who've received accusatory letters from the original murder victim's dead father blaming them for her death.ĭid you follow that? Because that's just the opening set up to this story! There's the alleged murder of a young woman in the mystery club, her parents and two servants were later murdered in a separate event which remains an open case. I struggled a little to balance the plots at first. I know prologues are often hated but I loved that opening paragraph. He had been thinking about just one thing for days." He sat down on the cold concrete of the breakwater and faced the deep darkness, his body veiled by the white vapour of his breath. The muffled sound of the waves welled up from the endless shadows, only to disappear again.
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