"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...

Originally posted June 14, 2024. “But now, Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever.” When thinking about how to organize my blogging chronicle of the 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library , I settled on a randomly-generated order (with some leeway for availability) to avoid twenty straight weeks of John Dickson Carr. That means we’re kicking off the series with an unusual entry: Isaac Asimov’s science fiction murder mystery The Caves of Steel . Asimov is best known for the Robot series, followed by other influential SF like the Foundation trilogy, but he was a mystery lover who wrote some stories of his own, including the later Black Widower series (of which I’ve only read “The Cross of Lorraine”). Caves of Steel is both: a fair-play mystery follow-up to the stories in I, Robot , investigated by a human/robot duo, and the result is rather unique. The Locked Room: A pioneering roboticist is shot on his...