But about a year ago, the Blue Mansion burned down, killing all the family members. However, the dead people were found to have sedatives, so they are believed to be murdered. What's also irritating are some of the childish reactions and the accompanying drawing style at those moments. This may be normal in some manga forms, but in this story we're not dealing with immature high school youngsters, but with university students who are all in their twenties. Thus such reactions seem rather awkward and not fitting in the mystery plot. The art and character design are gorgeous. I particularly enjoyed the eerie shading in some of the panels showing the island and the Decagon House. It’s probably too soon to tell, but this seems like a series where I’ll be slightly more invested in the characters (dangerously so as it appears one club member may already be dead by the end of the volume) than the actual murder mystery as I already love Ellery and Van far too much. ⁣ The novel might have worked better if it had focused solely on the puzzle, and treated the characters just as role-playing cogs in the story's machinery.

The Decagon House Murders is a pale imitation of the novel it is trying to pay homage to. While by no means a terrible read, I found it to be boring and ultimately deeply underwhelming. As the self-proclaimed whodunnit enthusiast that I am, I was looking forward to reading this, especially as it promised to be a playfully meta murder mystery. Rather than reading like a celebration of the golden age crime novel, The Decagon House Murders reads like an incredibly derivative work that is not nearly as clever a novel as it portends to be. However, things take a wild turn when the members of the mystery club get killed one by one, and the killer is just among them, hiding in plain sight. This book when released was apparently one of the leaders in the resurgence of the Honkaku genre (which had lost popularity with the rise of noir and police procedurals). I don’t know if this is because of the clever conclusion or if there was something majorly lost in translation, but I don’t quite get why this would be one of the standouts. Would I give it a recommendation? Only to a very specific group of people. To really enjoy this one, you have to be a person who enjoys the deduction aspect of a mystery novel over the plot. You need to be the person who sits there puzzling over every line and trying to think outside the box… those here for the story will likely leave unfulfilled, those here for the “game” of it, they may find something special.

A group of university students, members of their school’s mystery club, spend a week on an uninhabited island, the scene of a gruesome murder-suicide the year before. They’re camped out in a small ten-sided house, the only building still standing after a mansion on the island burned down during the previous crime. Lo que más he de destacar de la obra es el arte, el dibujo me parece bellísimo y los personajes están diseñados para ser muy diferentes entre sí. Esto ayuda a distinguirlos, ya que los nombres japoneses a veces pueden ser complicados de recordar, aunque esto también se soluciona con los apodos del club del misterio, referencia a autores conocidos del mundo del terror y el misterio, como Agatha Christie. Las referencias a los autores y obras del mundo del misterio son otro de los factores que más destacan y que te hacen sonreír ante ello, a pesar de lo siniestro del manga.

This is the debut novel of the author and also the first of his works to be translated into English. It was the second novel with the same premises that I read in a short period, but I must admit that this one beats ‘Whisper Island’ easily. They both have students going to a remote island where they’re killed off 1 by 1 and both openly pay homage to Agatha Christie’s original. That's what Ayatsuji tries to set up and then play out here: a limited cast of characters, many with their own little (and some pretty big) secrets, isolated on this island -- and, apparently, one of them a murderer, killing the others off, one by one. The book’s supposed self-awareness didn’t really add anything, if anything it made me all the more unconvinced by the characters’ ignorance and ineptitude. On the other hand we see how 2 former members of the Mystery Novel Research Association are getting strange letters and start a little investigation.Also, THAT ENDING??? I want to know what happens next! I haven't read the novel yet but I will do VERY soon. I really cannot wait my mind is buzzing. I'm a bit suspicious of Be that as it may, let's see how I enjoyed the first volume of the English manga-adaptation of this novel, which was illustrated by Hiro Kiyohara and released by publisher Kodansha on August 17th. Kawaminami had actually left the party before anything happened to Chiori that fateful night, and since he has distanced himself from the club anyway he doesn't feel particularly guilty.