"I’ve finally figured out the secret of those three drawings. I can’t imagine the kind of pain you must have been suffering. Nor can I understand the depths of whatever sin you committed. I cannot forgive you. But even so, I will always love you." Strange Pictures by horror Youtuber Uketsu is a multimedia psychological horror/mystery novel told (partially) in the form of pencil drawings, where the reader, as detective, has to figure out the hidden meanings in each image. Overall, I felt like I would have liked to see more drawings, not just because the multimedia gimmick was the best part but because then, I would've spent less time having to read it. The book's prologue is an academic lecture about children's psychological drawings, in which the lecturer discusses how a person's subconscious character can be inferred from their art. Armed with this knowledge, we are then tossed into three short stories which all revolve around the mysterious significance of ...

Sometimes you discover something isn't available in English and kick rocks in disappointment. Other times, at least if you're me, the fact that something is not available in English, and barely anyone has talked about it at all, only drives a stubborn obsession with tracking it down regardless. That was what happened with the Mario books after I read "A Smart Dummy in the Tent", the sole English-translated story from 人形はこたつで推理する (The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu), by Takemaru Abiko (tl. Ho-Ling Wong). The Mario series is about a ventriloquist, Yoshio Tomonaga, who solves mysteries with his puppet Mario. The trick here is that, as you might guess from the title, it’s the puppet, and not the ventriloquist, who’s the detective. (Mario is, as the series puts it, Tomonaga's "alternate personality", although "imaginary friend" might be more accurate.) This leads to comical hijinks in situations where it would not be appropriate to do a puppetry ...

“But rest assured, my indications will lead you to the truth.” He paused. Then he said: “And perhaps, then, you would wish that they had not led you so far. You would say instead: ‘Ring down the curtain.’” The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was one of the first mystery novels I read, the one that arguably made me Someone Who Is Into Detective Fiction. The other two Poirot novels that my school library had were Murder on the Orient Express and Curtain: Poirot's Last Case . Quite the reading order. What you might call a speedrun. Which meant that this grand summation of Poirot flew way over my head the first time I read it (where is Styles, anyway?). I've now read, I think, just over half of the novels, so more of the references to past events made sense. On a reread, I would still say Curtain 's mystery has its underwhelming elements. But oh, that ending. The Locked Room: A man is found dead in his locked room (which the narrator saw him enter), holding a gun and with a bullet h...

"All living things in this world go to war. It doesn't matter if they're big or small. As long as life exists, we'll all keep killing each other." Two lovers reincarnate in an endless cycle across history, destined to always find one another, cursed to always kill each other with the same dagger. Not a premise you look at and think "sounds like a fair-play locked room scenario", but that's exactly what you get in The Lapis Lazuli Castle Murders , an unconventional detective novel by Takekuni Kitayama. It's the second book in his Castle series, which could be compared to Yukito Ayatsuji's Mansion series (each case is themed around a weird castle) except that as far as I'm aware, the detective doesn't carry over. Kimiyo is a young librarian suffering from terminal brain cancer. One day, the mysterious Kito comes to "the Library at the End of the World", claiming that Kimiyo was his lover in a past life, that she was once...

That's the thing about old friends. You just know these things about them. You have learned to love them. This is the glue that binds us together. The Hunting Party is Lucy Foley's first book, so I'm reading it in reverse order relative to The Midnight Feast from a couple weeks ago. And... I really did not like this one. That surprised me, considering that the elements I didn't like about it were all—okay, maybe they weren't my favourite parts of Midnight Feast either, but I thought they came off better there than they did here. Maybe it's because there was more bonkers supernatural drama in The Midnight Feast. Or maybe The Hunting Party's cast of insufferable rich people are just that much more punchable. The Hunting Party follows a group of old uni friends, now in their thirties with high-powered jobs, and who don't seem to have much in common anymore except their annual New Year's party. This crew could have been guests at the luxury retre...

How terribly alone one was, among all one's friends... Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand is widely regarded by anglophone mystery readers as a top-notch locked room mystery with a devious solution, but it was technically left off the actual Locked Room Library list due to the French translation changing the ending. That only made me more curious to know what all the fuss was about. Some of the other entries are more properly "impossible crimes" than "sealed rooms", but this is one of the most thoroughly sealed rooms out there. The Locked Room: An actress in a medieval pageant is killed onstage: strangled by hand and her body apparently dropped over a balcony by the killer. But the set was locked on the stage side, and the only other exit is in full view of the audience.   Of course, as Inspector Charlesworth points out, "in sealed room mysteries, the solution is never really anything to do with the room being sealed. The murderer has always gone into...