The prolific Shimada (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 2015 deserves to have more of his work translated into English. He creates a...
A locked-room mystery in a uniquely built mansion is not so much a whodunit as a how-done-it…illustrated!
A list of dramatis personae, a detailed drawing of the Ice Floe Mansion, and a plummy prologue theatrically set the scene. The story is divided into four “Acts,” each of them in turn divided into “Scenes,” with the final act preceded by a challenge to the reader. The puzzle begins when oil executive Kozaburo Hamamoto invites a diverse group of eight guests to his mansion on a snowy night. He embarrasses his daughter, Eiko, by suggesting that one of the male guests might be her new husband. Once everyone has been locked into their rooms, a series of unusual events begins. In her room at the top, guest Kumi Aikura sees a threatening man appear, impossibly, at her window. It’s a snowy night, but no footprints show up anywhere around the house except when the party ventures out to see what they think is a corpse but turns out to be an antique doll Kozaburo purchased in Czechoslovakia. Whoever placed it there also decapitated it. The next morning, when guest Kazuya Ueda, the chauffeur of industrialist Eikichi Kikuoka, fails to appear for breakfast, his locked room is broken into and he’s found dead, bound to his bed frame. Enter a team of police, led by DCI Saburo Ushikoshi, who begins the methodical questioning of suspects and the (armchair) sleuthing.
The prolific Shimada (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 2015 deserves to have more of his work translated into English. He creates a delightfully intricate murder puzzle with retro charm, bound to tantalize readers.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78227-456-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
