The Lapis Lazuli Castle Murders (2002/2024) by Takekuni Kitayama (translated by Mitsuda Konno and cosmiicnana)

I suspect that most readers of this blog probably don’t know the name Takekuni Kitayama. Unless, that is, you play the Danganronpa series of games. Kitayama got his start writing novels in 1991 but didn’t really become prominent until his prequel Danganronpa Kirigiri novels. He would also work on New Danganronpa V3. But his start were the Castle books, a series of books that are connected not by recurring characters or a central detective, but by the recurring motif of seven cursed daggers, six headless knights, of fantastical settings. And, of course, by locked rooms.

And decapitations. Lots of decapitations.

Our chances of getting translations of his non-Danganronpa work were slim, but thankfully Mitsuda Konno and cosmiicnana stepped in to translate The “Lapis Lazuli Castle” Murders. Well, technically it’s human-edited MTL, but my understanding is that nana actually did contribute to the translation, and we’re going to focus on the “human-edited” part. I’d heard wonderful things about this book across the blogosphere, but would it hold up?

Japan, 1989. Kimiyo is a young woman who is a regular patron at a certain library, one so removed from civilization that it’s known as “The Library at the End of the World.” One day, a young man, Kito comes in and says, “Hey babe, you and me, we’re connected, reincarnations of a knight and his lady, doomed to kill each other with cursed daggers over and over again in an endless, brutal cycle, from which we cannot escape. There is no hope.”

Kito is very bad at pickup lines.

Kimiyo wants to dismiss it, but it is a very weird thing to lie about. And the library does have a weird dagger in the storeroom. And there are odd legends attached to it…

1243, France. Marie is the only daughter of Count Geoffrey, a brooding and possibly unstable lord who’s cooped up in the Lapis Lazuli Castle (“because of the bluish stones that made up the outer walls”). Marie has a cogent of knights at her disposal, led by the dashing Raine. Marie fears her father, suspecting that he had something to do with the disappearance of her mother. Marie saw the two of them enter a room, but when she entered, they had vanished. And then she saw footprints appear on the floor, one by one, heading into the wall. Raine is able to explain this but becomes the victim of a mystery himself. One night, Marie finds his helmet lying outside her bedroom. Come morning, the knights have all disappeared from the castle, seemingly slipping past the guards and leaving no footprints in the mud outside. They are found up a nearby river, their heads hacked off. What’s even weirder is that it would take a day’s journey to get to where their bodies were found, but all six knights were seen alive twelve hours before…

1916, Verdun. Jean is a French solider suffering through the horrors of trench warfare. Marie is now a nurse, and the two of them are looking for a way to break the endless cycle. Jean has other issues as well. He sees a German solider approaching, but when he gets close, Jean sees that he’s missing his head. One of his comrades reports another soldier’s head vanishing in an instant. He finds four bodies with their heads hacked off in a bunker, but they vanish in the seconds he takes his eyes off them.

And jumping between these periods is the nonbinary detective Snowy, someone who walks around “looking for chaos” to restore order. Luckily, there’s a lot of chaos to go around.

So, there’s a lot going on here. In spite of the long summary, the different periods are pretty well-segregated, keeping what could easily have been a sprawling mess under control. This is one of those books that’s all about the mystery. The back-and-forth between the characters is lively enough, but in the end, you’re reading this for the tricks.

They are, for the most part, good. I thought the WWI segment was the weakest in this regard. The explanation for the decapitations is okay, but the vanishing bodies are an anticlimax. Even Jean gripes about how the explanation doesn’t really help him out, "The answer gave me nothing.” The 1243 segment is pretty solid. The diagrams make it pretty clear what happened, I think, though it requires some specific knowledge to explain everything about the crimes. I love those diagrams though. And they’re very useful with the third set of murders in this book.

About two-thirds through, the Library at the End of the World becomes the stage for a brutal triple murder in a locked room that leaves two employees decapitated and another lying stabbed on the floor. Oddly, this one is solved pretty quickly after it happens, which is a shame because it’s the best one in the book. If I were to state the solution as bluntly as possible, it would sound stupid, but Kitayama makes it work. He’s helped in this by the diagrams, which make a confusing crime scene very clear. I looked at one and thought, “Hey, why is X like that?” and lo and behold, that was a clue. Even better is that there’s a very good reason—a very twisted reason—why the killer goes to so much effort to do it this way. I also like how Kitayama paces the explanations. He doesn’t just dump them all at the end but explains them at different points. (And Snowy isn’t the only one who gets the honors of summation.) Answering some of the mysteries keeps the book moving forward and prevents the climax from getting bogged down in explanations at the end, right when our heroes are facing the firing squad.

I do have a few issues. Like I said, this is not a book for those of you who want in-depth characterization or lyrical writing. The other major issue I had is with how reincarnation is handled. It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but I’ll try: If I were to tell you that a story revolves around reincarnation, you’d probably think that there are certain rules it operates under. I’m thinking of two in particular. Neither of them apply here. One of these twists is admittedly foreshadowed by dialogue earlier in the novel. The other twist came out of nowhere for me. I don’t know if reincarnation has other common themes in Japanese culture that would ground this twist better, but it really threw me at first. In fairness, I got over it, and Kitayama uses this violation in interesting ways, such as how it ties into the killer’s motive for all this bloodshed. And I liked how Snowy’s time jumping wasn’t just a fun gimmick but actually plays a role in the climax. For all my griping, Kitayama works the fantastical elements into the book instead of just using them as set dressing or as jumping off points for the rest of the story.

And the final map is a nice touch.

I can’t hate anything that swings for the fences like this. What we have here is a story with some eye-catching premises but with solid mysteries backing them. This is a roller coaster ride of a book, with ideas fired off left and right. There are a couple of duds, but the best land with the force of a mortar. Absolutely worth reading for locked room fans, or those who want to see some imagination in their crime fiction. Recommended.

The book can be read here. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Beneath the Stains of Time, To Solve a Mystery (under February), Puzzles, Riddles, and Murders, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).

Strange Houses (2021/2025) by Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion)

I enjoyed horror author Uketsu’s Strange Pictures when I read it last year. Thankfully for all the Uketsu fans, 2025 saw the English release of his first novel, Strange Houses, but I was a little uncertain. I’d heard that this book wasn’t as good as his second one. I’d also watched the YouTube video (make sure to turn off the auto-dub) that he later turned into Strange Houses, and while it had some interesting points, I didn’t find it all that scary. But, as the title of this post shows, I gave the book a shot anyway.

The book opens with the author/narrator, a freelance writer specializing in stories of the macabre, receiving a request from a friend. This friend is looking for a house for him and his wife, and he’s found a promising one. But there’s a weird anomaly in the floor plan: a space in the kitchen that’s completely walled-off and serves no purpose. Intrigued, the narrator brings the floor plans to his friend, Kirihara, “a draughtsman with a prestigious architectural firm.” Kirihara is fascinated, but he soon finds more oddities than just that odd space. There’s one more bed than there should be, there’s a window peeping into one of the bedrooms, and there’s one more glaring issue, one that gets him to thinking about something truly evil going on in that house…

…And that revelation comes totally out of nowhere. It’s ludicrous. It’s a massive leap based on what we know, but Kirihara is of course 100% right. The rest of the book expands on the central plot of the video. The narrator posts about the house online, looking for more information, and is contacted by a woman whose husband vanished after visiting another odd house. Again, Kirihara and the narrator go to work prying open the house’s dark secrets. After that, the two of them are shown one more floor plan, this one based off the memories of a house their client visited in childhood. What should have been a peaceful visit ended when a young boy turned up dead. The official story is that he fell from an altar, but Kirihara again draws darker conclusions.

When the book is focusing on the author and Kirihara looking over floor plans and making deductions, it’s great. A lot of the anomalies in the plans don’t require architectural knowledge, just thinking about how a room fits into the wider design of a house, or what a room would look like if you opened a window into it. The third story is honestly a good murder mystery in and of itself. And I like how Uketsu takes the basic idea behind the first floor plan and mixes it up for the other two. This book is pretty short, but I could have read a book twice its size just going over floor plans. The problem is the book’s overarching plot. Almost everything about it is ridiculous and the root of Kirihara’s wilder conclusions. The first and third stories end with him uttering something completely off the wall that’s barely, if at all, supported by what we’ve learned. Ho-Ling compares the first chapter to an urban legend where you don't need to have a 100% airtight explanation; in fact the irrationality is part of the appeal. But when Uketsu tried to expand and rationalize it, the wheels started coming off.

The problems with the book’s plot come to the fore in the final chapter, where the author and another character finally get some answers about what’s going on…in the form of an exposition dump. One long chapter of exposition. The thing is, the backstory is genuinely interesting and messed up! Feuding families! Sinister plots! Curses! Insane rituals! Delusions that wreck havoc on real people! It’s all so juicy, but it gets poured on you all at once. There needed to be one more chapter to pace these revelations out a bit or at least devote half of the final chapter to one more floor plan that could have let us deduce at least part of this. The book ends on a note of unsettling ambiguity, but the impact is lessened because it’s about people we’ve never met!

It’s frustrating, because the individual mysteries are quite good and worth reading, and I like the central concept for the horror, especially in the first story. (ROT13: Rirel ubhfr unf oyvaq fcbgf, naq guvf gnxrf vg gb gur rkgerzr jvgu jung’f nyzbfg n ubhfr-jvguva-n-ubhfr, haorxabjafg gb gur bhgfvqr jbeyq.) But I can’t really justify plopping down full price for Strange Houses in light of its issues. If you’re still interested, check out the linked video above, which would later become the first story of this book. If that intrigues you, try looking this up at your local library. If not, then this is Not Recommended.

I’m still gonna read Strange Buildings. Remember how I said I’d read a book twice this one’s length that’s all about floor plans? Buildings sounds like that.

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Stephen M. Pierce, Beneath the Stains of Time, Pretty Sinister Books (contains some spoilers, not much more than my own).

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) by G. K. Chesterton

While I’ve read a few of his stories in anthologies and a few for The New Locked Room Library, the works of G. K. Chesterton have been a bit of a blind spot in my mystery reading. I’ve never sat down and really read his stories starring the seemingly dopey Father Brown. I decided to change that and bought a compilation of the full series, giving me a chance to dive into the first collection of these stories, The Innocence of Father Brown.

The title is a bit of a joke. Father Brown might be as innocent as a dove, but he’s as wise as a serpent. “Has is never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?” he asks in his first appearance. His adventures demonstrate that he is, in fact, very aware of human evil, and his heart breaks over it.

We begin our journey with “The Blue Cross.” The story focuses on Inspector Valentin, who is in pursuit of the thief Flambeau, who is targeting the titular jeweled cross. Valentin is quickly on the trail of two priests, one tall like Flambeau, one short, kinda dumb-looking, “a silly sheep,” probably a sap dragged along for the ride. But the two seem to be leaving a lot of chaos in their wake, from switched salt and sugar dispensers to a broken window. Some of the impact of this story has been lost nowadays, since everyone knows this is the first Father Brown story and not the first Inspector Valentin one. But it’s a charming story with a twist that still holds power.

“The Secret Garden” sees Valentin invite some guests, including the good father, to his home for a party. The main attraction of the house is the center garden, which can’t be accessed from outside the house. The festivities are interrupted when a body turns up in the garden, sans head. Suspicion immediately falls on the American millionaire who seems to have ditched the group with the murder weapon in tow. But there’s only one entrance to the house, and the suspect was never seen leaving, nor, for that matter, can anyone figure out how the unnamed victim was able to get inside. This is a traditional mystery, complete with five questions that, when answered, point to the victim, method, and killer. I suspect that most people will at least suspect part of the truth, but the final reveal has some good shocks to it. It’s not a perfect story (it’s very vague on *when the murder is supposed to have happened), but an excellent forebearer of things to come.

Father Brown plays armchair—or at least, normal chair—detective in “The Queer Feet.” He’s recording the confession of a dead man when he overhears footsteps in the hallway. Strange footsteps, that seem to switch from a confident jog to meek tiptoeing:“But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run?” The explanation hinges on some classism that most readers won’t pick up on at all, but I’ll admit, it’s a good explanation. The setting is neat too; a private hotel that’s gained its reputation for quality based on nothing more than the fact that it’s exclusive. Chesterton is great with unusual or quirky locations.

This story also contains the most hype line from Father Brown:“I don’t want to threaten you, but—” “I do want to threaten you,” said Father Brown, in a voice like a rolling drum. “I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched.”

“The Flying Stars” is a Christmas story. Father Brown is invited to an estate for a Christmas party. One of the guests happens to be the owner of the titular stars, a trio of jewels that have been the target of every thief on both sides of the Atlantic, including Flambeau. The theft comes late, but how he steals the jewels is a thing of beauty. Of course, Father Brown foils him, and finally brings him to repentance with a well-argued bit of theology.

This is also the story where Father Brown reminisces about doing blackface and another character urges him to do it again, so.

And now we get to “The Invisible Man,” the most famous story Chesterton wrote and one of the most popular mystery stories of all time. It is also, to hear some tell of it, completely overrated with a nonsense solution. I don’t totally agree. But I think people get so focused on the solution that they overlook just how odd the actual set up is. You see, there’s this woman, Laura, who tried to get rid of some unwelcome suitors by telling them that she would only marry a man who’s made his way in the world. Bad news: One of those suitors, Smythe, has indeed made something of himself as an inventor of robot servants (I’m serious). Worse news: The other man, Welkin, has not made something of himself but seems to have taken the Jack Griffin route and developed invisibility.

Laura has heard his laughter in an empty street and Smythe has found his threatening letters in his home. When he leaves another public message saying that Smythe will die for contacting Laura, her current suitor brings the case to Flambeau, now a private detective. He even goes as far as to ensure that witnesses are watching his house. Alas, by the time he returns, Smythe has vanished, leaving only a pool of blood behind. And the witnesses say they saw no one go by, but there’s a trail of footprints in the snow…“God! The Invisible Man!”

You know, Chesterton probably was inspired by the H. G. Wells novel. Anyway.

I think this story is a little overrated, but I see how the solution would leave an impact on readers. People say it doesn’t work. I’ll contest this slightly. It works, but not in type of mystery on display here. Allow me to give the final word on this issue. (ROT13: Sngure Oebja’f rkcynangvba gung crbcyr qba’g abgvpr freinagf/zravny jbexref hayrff pvephzfgnaprf pnyy sbe vg vf n inyvq bofreingvba naq jbhyq unir orra rira zber fb ng gur gvzr. V unir ab ceboyrz oryvrivat gung abar bs gur jvgarffrf jbhyq dhrfgvba n znvyzna jnyxvat ol abe guvax bs uvz nf n “fgenatre” gb jngpu bhg sbe. Ohg gung’f abg gur fpranevb! Gurl’ir rkcyvpvgyl orra gbyq gb xrrc na rlr bhg sbe crbcyr! Gurl znl abg vzzrqvngryl whzc gb gur znvyzna, ohg fheryl haqre dhrfgvbavat gurl’q fnl, “Jryy, gur znvyzna jrag guebhtu.” Naq gurer’f ab jnl gung gurl jbhyqa’g cnl nggragvba gb uvz ng nyy. Vs Ntahf unq whfg nffhzrq gung sbhe jvgarffrf jbhyq xrrc Fzlgur fnsr naq qvqa’g gryy gurz gb xrrc na rlr bhg, vg jbhyq unir pbaivaprq.) So, not the highlight of the collection, that comes later, but it’s worth reading.

Next up is “The Honour of Israel Gow.” Gow was the servant of the reclusive Earl of Glengyle, the last of his disturbed family. He’s dead, of natural causes (or so they think), but since Israel didn’t bother to tell anyone that he died, there’s some suspicion flying around. Complicating matters further is that the house is full of odd objects. Jewels lying around unattended, snuff laying out without containers, the lead of lead pencils. All this baffles the investigators, only for Father Brown to toss out three different plausible connections between some of the missing items. It's a delightful scene, and one can't help but feel that the good father is showing off. But when Father Brown finds that someone has cut the halo from the Child Jesus and the name of God from missals and pictures, the normally unflappable Father suspects black magic. And that’s before they dig up the headless corpse.

Needless to say, with a set-up like this, you’re either going to deliver on the madness or have an anti-climax. Chesterton has the latter, but in fairness, it’s a deliberate anti-climax, hinging on the odd logic of the titular Gow. It’s possible to figure out what he’s done, but most modern readers likely won’t see it.

“The Wrong Shape” sees Father Brown and Flambeau at the house of a poet. A normal, everyday visit, were it not for the dagger laying outside, which is the wrong shape. And before Father Brown and Flambeau can take their leave, the poet’s doctor reports that something is wrong. The poet lies in his conservatory, the door locked, a dagger in his side. And on his table, a note: “I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!” How was the crime done? And why did the victim, killer, or whoever, snip a little bit of the paper? The locked room is pretty basic. The idea behind the paper is good, though later authors would use it better than Chesterton does here. Still, not a bad story.

This is also the story where Father Brown says that he sees evil in the design of Turkish carpets, so.

Father Brown and Flambeau enter the land of fairies in “The Sins of Prince Saradine.” The prince wants to meet with the old rogue and swap war stories, the prince being a man of low character himself, so Flambeau and the father arrive at the prince’s estate, a house made of reeds on an island. Father Brown thinks something is off here, and indeed, the normally sharp priest seems off-balance from the get-go…but there’s nothing obviously wrong. Then a man arrives, one with a grudge against the prince. There’s a duel, a death, and finally the horrid truth. Chesterton foreshadows the solution well, and the ending is powerful.“It isn’t only nice things that happen in fairyland.”

“The Hammer of God” takes us to the little village of Bohun Beacon. The local cad, Colonel Bohun, has set his sights on the blacksmith’s wife, to the disgust of his brother and, one must assume, her husband. Not to mention the lady herself. So it’s no surprise when someone smashes his head open with a hammer, but what is a surprise is that the hammer is a small thing, seemingly incapable of delivering the massive blow that killed him. The blacksmith could have done it with the hammer, but he has an alibi. His wife could have hit him with the hammer but couldn’t have delivered that strong of a blow. Luckily, Father Brown is in the area, and reveals the truth, an ingenious and well-foreshadowed one. While I doubt Father Brown’s description of the origins of Presbyterianism, I do like how the theology and the solution are intertwined.

Flambeau has a new office in “The Eye of Apollo.” On the floor below him are a pair of sister secretaries, on the floor above is Kalon, the founder of a new religion that believes in staring into the sun. Father Brown arrives just in time for one of the sisters to take a plunge down the elevator shaft. But both suspects—her sister and Kalon—have alibis. I can’t explain why, but I have a weakness for the type of solution here. But I think it’s a good one anyway, with some clever, and when you know the context, wince-inducing, foreshadowing. But I don’t 100% agree with Father Brown’s logic as to how he knew who the killer was. (ROT13: Nsgre nyy, ur jnfa’g rkcrpgvat gur snyy rvgure, naq ur qvqa’g ernpg.)

The next story is “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” but I’d recommend skipping over that and moving onto the final story, “The Three Tools of Death.” This is because “Sign” is very, very good and “Tools” is the only weak story of the collection. An aggressively-cheerful millionaire is found dead outside his home, and the crime scene is a mess. Someone unloaded a pistol at the floor, there’s a bloody knife in the room, there’s a rope wrapped around the victim’s legs…but he actually died from falling out his window. There’s some good bits in here (the sharp critique of aggressive cheerfulness, the clue of the bloody face), but, you know, I don’t believe a single thing that anyone does during the victim’s death. It’s well-clued, but my response when reading was sheer bafflement.

But “The Sign of the Broken Sword” redeems all. Father Brown takes Flambeau on a nighttime tour across all the monuments to the great war hero, Arthur St. Claire. He was killed after a battle with the Brazilian patriot, Oliver, after which he was hanged from a tree, his broken sword around his next. That’s the story everyone knows. “It is also entirely wrong.” Why would a skilled, knowledgeable general lead a suicidal charge? Why would Oliver, known as compassionate and merciful to his enemies, hang the general after the battle? “One of the wisest men in the world act like an idiot for no reason. One of the best men in the world acted like a fiend for no reason.” The evidence is there, clear as day, but the truth is horrifying, one of the great acts of evil in all of mystery fiction. This is the best story of the collection, and, while I still have four collections to go, is a shoo-in for the story that best represents Father Brown, his wisdom, and his compassion, even in the face of evil. Read this one last when you read this collection and end it on a high note.

I thought going in that the Father Brown stories would be more “vibes,” carrying basic ideas through Chesterton’s poetic language and scene-setting. Well, it has plenty of that, but there’s real brilliance here, some of the best of early mystery fiction and a fair bit better than some modern works. They have charm and they have power. If you’re interested in the history of the genre, The Innocence of Father Brown is a must-read. But even if you’re not, this is Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Grandest Game in the World, Solving the Mystery of Murder.

The Water Room (2004) by Christopher Fowler

I probably would have read Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room earlier, but for some reason I never saw it in bookstores. I would always see Full Dark House, but it was only a couple of months ago that I finally saw this in my normal used bookstore haunt.

The book opens with Benjamin Singh, a sometimes-consultant for the Peculiar Crimes Unit, asking Arthur Bryant to look into the odd death of his sister, Ruth. She died, apparently of a heart attack, in her basement. At first, it seems to be nothing more than a sad and slightly strange death, barring a slight injury to the back of her head, but Bryant finds that her mouth is full of water. River water to be exact. How did she ingest river water in her bone-dry basement?

Meanwhile, John May has a problem of his own. An academic acquaintance of his, Gareth Greenwood, has let himself be sucked into an illegal scheme involving London’s “lost” rivers. These are rivers that have been covered up by decades of construction and underneath the city; the Fleet is the most notable. What Greenwood is doing is anyone’s guess—perhaps being an accomplice to bank robbery—but it gives the PCU something to do and keeps their resources out of the greedy hands over their overseer.

Also tied in with this is Kallie Owen and her boyfriend, Paul, who move into Ruth Singh’s house. Kallie is looking forward to making a home of the place, but her renovation work is frustrated by Ruth’s overly large and dingy bathroom. She’s always hearing the sound of rushing water down there, and there’s a weird wet stain that sometimes appears on the wall…

Reading this plot thread, I was reminded that Fowler was mostly a horror writer until this series.

There’s a lot going on in this book. I didn’t even mention the homeless man lurking on Balaklava Street, or the other deaths that follow. Someone is butchering the residents of Ruth’s neighborhood, leaving no evidence behind when they do. And all the while, London is going through an unseasonable rainy period; Fowler never lets you forget about the ever present water that drones on and on, or the rivers below London. There's a lot of love for the city on display in the book. Fowler seizes any opportunity to drown the reader in arcane London facts, from interesting historical buildings to a lot of information on London’s water system that has subdued the lost rivers. When this works, it’s fascinating, but sometimes you feel like you’re getting a Wikipedia article every other paragraph.

So there’s good writing, but a weak mystery. First, I’ve seen this book labeled as an impossible crime, and it’s not. Ruth’s death is weird, but it’s never treated as an impossible crime (though the explanation for it is fine). There’s not much in the way of cluing. I wouldn’t be surprised if keen readers can make a good stab at the killer identity, but I would be shocked if anyone noticed all the clues and figured out their motive. Bryant’s explanation for the third murder involves a lot of “I guess” or “I’m pretty sure this is what the killer was thinking.” A big plot thread gets suddenly dropped until the ending of the book. But my main issue is that, once again, Fowler teases the reader wish fascinating esoterica and the motive has very little to do with it. It’s a little better than Full Dark House, and I was more satisfied with it, but I was still slightly disappointed. (ROT13: V guvax gung vs Sbjyre unq vzcyvrq gung gurer jnf fbzr zlfgvp vasyhrapr jbexvat ba gur xvyyre gb thvqr gurz gb qb jung gurl qvq, rira vs vg jnf whfg inthr uvagf, V jbhyq unir orra unccvre jvgu vg. Nf vg vf, vg’f nyy whfg n pbvapvqrapr.)

But was there anything good about this book? Yes, actually. This is our first look at Bryant and May as long-time partners, and I liked their dynamic. Bryant is like the great detective of yore; brilliant and knowledgeable but also prickly and rude. (Although there is an amusing chapter where he has to befriend the son of one of the families on the street and gives the kid the time of his life.) He’s always looking back to the past. Contrast this with May, who’s not only more technologically adapt and forward looking, but can read people better than Bryant can. He doesn’t do too much, and the final honor of the explanation goes to Bryant, but you see how they function as partners and how they complement each other. And like I said earlier, Fowler is a good writer with a deep love of London. You’ll learn something from this, I guarantee it.

So overall, I was slightly underwhelmed by The Water Room. The mystery was stronger than Fowler’s last book, and I don’t regret reading it, but it still wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Recommended, with Caveats, as the book is too high quality to dismiss outright, but those of you who only care about the mystery might want to look elsewhere. 

Other Reviews: The Grandest Game in the World, She Reads Novels.

The Tragedy of Z (1933) by Ellery Queen

This is the third third book in a series I’ve read this month. I didn’t plan it this way!

I read The Tragedy of Z in The XYZ Murders omnibus, and the introduction to this book says that, in-universe, it was a decade between The Tragedy of Y and the current work, although in-real life only a year passed. Why we established this, I don’t know. And seeing as this intro was written by Ellery Queen, I’m guessing that it was now common knowledge in 1933 that “Barnaby Ross” and “Ellery Queen” were the same people? Any Queen fans want to fill me in on any of this?

Anyway, it’s been a decade. District Attorney Bruno is now Governor Bruno, and Inspector Thumm has retired from the force and become a PI. Joining him is his daughter, Patience, fresh off spending her education in Europe. She’s the narrator of our tale. Now, I don’t know about you but hearing that the Queen cousins were going to write from the point of view of a woman filled me with dread and terror. Thankfully, Patience isn’t actually too bad, barring some bits that I’m inclined to think were just the Queen cousins trying to emulate romance stories of the time.

When our book begins, Thumm has picked up a new client. Elihu Clay is an honest businessman, but he’s worried that his partner, Dr. Ira Fawcett, is using his company as a shield for shady doings. These are wise suspicions, seeing as the good doctor’s brother, Joel, is the corrupt senator of Tilden County…and the doctor is suspected of being the power behind the throne. So the Thumms set out to dig around for some evidence against the doctor (and Patience to dodge Elihu’s son’s amorous charms), but their investigation is soon derailed…by murder!

Joel Fawcett is found stabbed to death inside his home. There’s no shortage of people, personal or political, who might have thought he was better off silenced forever. He’s clutching part of a wooden chest with the letters “HA” carved into it. Contra what you would expect from a Queen novel, this isn’t a dying message, but some sort of threat, with accompanying blackmail letter from Aaron Dow. Dow has spent the past twelve years in the nearby Algonquin Prison for manslaughter, so what could he have had on the senator? Dow was released the day of the murder, making him suspect number one, but Patience is sure, based on her analysis of the scene, that he’s totally innocent. Of course, mere logic won’t convince the ambitious local DA, especially not from a woman, meaning her and her father have to turn to another authority: Drury Lane.

I gotta admit, I see the DA’s point. Patience’s logic is interesting, but I don’t quite buy the science behind it myself. Oh well. The central idea of getting an innocent man off the hook is a good one that gives the book some forward momentum and (for me at least) automatically leads to some investment as we see the noose tighten around Dow’s neck. Interesting to note that Queen did the same thing in Tragedy of X. Like X though, it has the same problem of there not really being anything else to sink your teeth into after the first murder. There’s more incident, yes, and some good cluing, but I could see readers getting bored after the trial. Also, while there’s some promising nods in the direction of pork, graft, and small-town corruption, none of that goes anywhere.

One thing that makes this book interesting and gives it a little more heft is the Queen cousins’ obvious criticism of the death penalty, and the prison system in general. We get an actual execution halfway through and it’s portrayed as grotesque and horrifying. I’d be curious to know how common anti-death penalty attitudes were in 1933. I’m not saying the Queens’ were taking some bold stance or anything but compare this to some British Golden Age novels that are much more cavalier about this. We’re three years off from Halfway House, the Queen cousins’ “first” stab at social commentary under their own name, so it’s interesting to see them trying to address social issues in an earlier book. Sadly, I don’t know if that really makes the book “good,” in light of the issues I mentioned about.

Ho-Ling praised Z for its logic chain at the end and, okay, that final sequence is great. Drury Lane interrupts another execution to demonstrate who the actual culprit is, and the logic is probably the most solid of these first three books. Less pedantic waffling about height and instead brutal and efficient elimination of all the suspects. It’s great. I like the final point that knocks the candidates for killer down to one. I don’t like how Lane’s starting point is a detail that it easy to skip over and only gets mentioned once, but the Queens would probably just tell me to pay closer attention. But I’d argue that the Queens shot themselves in the foot a bit here. (ROT13: Fb, gur xvyyre vf pbaarpgrq gb gur cevfba orpnhfr ur bcraf gur yrggre nobhg cevfba cebzbgvbaf. Bxnl, snve. Ohg gura Ynar’f rkcynangvba vf gung gur xvyyre znqr n jvyq nffhzcgvba nobhg jung vg pbagnvarq. Vg qvqa’g fvg evtug.) And the motive falls short for me. (ROT13: Nyy gur ohvyq-hc gb gur gvghyne gentrql gung tnir Qbj fb zhpu cbjre, naq vg unf fb yvggyr gb qb jvgu gur pevzr.)

So, in the end, it’s hard for me to really recommend this book, especially to those who aren’t already sold on Queen. I enjoyed it, but you might not, and I can see good reasons why someone wouldn’t enjoy it. I guess I’ll say that if “The detective interrupts an execution to lecture on how he solved the crime for ten pages” makes you sit up and pay attention, this is the book for you. If not, skip it. Recommended, with Caveats.

Other Reviews: Ah, Sweet Mystery, The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Dead Yesterday, Reading Ellery Queen.

Cabaret Macabre (2024) by Tom Mead

At the beginning of the year, I read The Murder Wheel, Tom Mead’s second novel staring magician Joseph Spector, and, unfortunately, I didn’t really care for it. I was annoyed about disliking a modern-day writer trying to emulate the Golden Age of Detective fiction, and who liked locked rooms. However, other reviews I’d read indicated that his third novel, Cabaret Macabre, was his best. I was looking forward to trying it, but was it worth the hype?

Cabaret revolves around Judge Giles Drury. Almost ten years ago, his secretary, Gloria Crane, died of strychnine poisoning. It’s unlikely that anyone would choose to commit suicide with such a painful poison, but there was no trace of it in any of the food and drink that she shared with the Drury family. Her fiancé, Victor Silvius, believed that Giles Drury had something to do with it and went after the judge with a knife, an act that got him sentenced to a sanitarium, where he has remained ever since. Both the judge and the head doctor are both part of a gentleman’s club called the “Tragedians,” and they take care of their own.

Cut to the present, and Victor’s sister, Caroline, comes to Inspector Flint claiming that the judge is trying to kill her brother. Broken glass has been discovered in his food. Around the same time, Judge Drury’s wife Elspeth calls on Joseph Spector claiming that Victor is trying to kill her husband. The man has been getting death threats, and someone even takes a shot at him while he’s meeting with Spector. Of course, that doesn’t explain how Victor could send the threats from his asylum cell.

And so, Spector agrees to accompany the judge and his family their estate, Marchbanks. Even the unflappable Spector can’t shake the eerie atmosphere and foreboding the house gives off, and his worst fears soon come true: Not even twenty-four hours after their arrival, a man is found stabbed to death on the frozen lake outside the home…and he will not be the first to die.

And what does all of this have to do with the brutally battered body stuffed in a trunk discovered at the novel’s opening?

Yes, Tom Mead once again stuffs this book full of incident. I complained about Murder Wheel having too much going on, but it works much better here, since everything is traced back to Marchbanks, the center of a web of revenge and bloodshed. The central idea that Mead plays with here is also very appealing to me. One of my favorite mystery stories is Agatha Christie’s “Motive vs. Opportunity.” There, the central problem revolves around a will that’s replaced by a blank sheet of paper. Those who had a motive to switch it had no opportunity, those who had the opportunity had no motive. I love mysteries that hinge on that duality, where one explanation seems impossible but the other makes no sense, or where both options seem impossible: “Every single interpretation had an equally valid opposing interpretation.”

Is Drury trying to kill Victor or is Victor trying to kill him? Did the judge kill Gloria Crane as his wife thinks, or did she kill Crane as he thinks? This even extends to the murders. On the one hand, the ice on the frozen lake was too thin to carry the body out. So he must have been killed before midnight and launched out onto the lake. But everyone had a alibi for that time and the weapon only went missing past midnight, so he must have been killed after the lake froze. But that’s impossible. Or take Gloria’s death. No one would choose to kill themselves with strychnine, so it must have been murder. But everyone shared food and drink and no one else was affected. So it must be suicide. But that makes no sense…and so on and so forth. Even the third death at Marshbanks, a shooting with a shotgun inside a room bolted from the inside, has elements of this: If the killer could have slipped onto the estate, why commit the crime with such an attention-getting weapon?

The explanations are, for the most part, satisfying. Mead prefers a different type f impossible crime than I do. I suspect that most readers will have a broad idea of the lake murder, even if they can’t explain the specifics. The shotgun locked room was fine, again, not my preferred style of solution. Gloria’s death is the one I can see being…not controversial, but I can see people not liking it. Thinking about it, I believe that it works and hammers in the “tragedy” theme that the book is going for, but it hinges on a type of logic I don’t like from locked room mysteries. And if Mead wanted to emphasize the tragedy part, Spector should have told the answer to more than just Inspector Flint.

The cluing is stronger than in the previous book. There, I complained that they were too vague, here they work much better. Some of the footnoted ones still fall in that category of “Come on, how could I have noticed that?” but most of them were things that I saw, or least felt like I should have seen. There were a couple of times when it felt like Spector was making some real big leaps, but I was, for the most part, satisfied. The pacing was also good. Mead is wise enough to resolve one of the murders at the two-thirds mark, meaning the final explanation isn’t backloaded. It’s a very good book.

Which makes it very odd that I kind of bounced off it overall. It’s like the opposite of my last review, where I had nothing but complaints about a book I liked, while here I have a lot of nice things to say about a book I didn’t care for. I’m inclined to think I just didn’t click with Mead’s writing style, because is an objectively good book that’s an improvement over its predecessor. It’s a fair bit better than his first book as well. I guess that the final solution has a few too many reversals for my taste. And I felt that some of the characters got off a bit too lightly, considering what they did.

But overall, I must give Cabaret Macabre a verdict of Recommended. If you’ve liked Tom Mead’s previous books or just locked room mysteries in general, this is well worth your time. If you didn’t like his previous books, this just might make a believer out of you. I’m only disappointed that it didn’t do the same for me. 

Other Reviews: Stephen M. Pierce, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Beneath the Stains of Time, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).

A Line to Kill (2021) by Anthony Horowitz

After having such a good time with The Sentence is Death, I was really looking forward to the next installment of Danny and Tony’s Excellent Adventures. A Line to Kill opens with Anthony “Tony” Horowitz once again getting embarrassed by Daniel Hawthorne in front of his peers. Tony’s publishers want to send him to a literary festival on Alderney, a small, rocky island that was occupied by the Germans in World War II. Tony is reluctant, seeing as the other authors are a hodge-podge of random writers (“an unhealthy chef, a blind psychic, a war historian, a children’s author, a French performance poet, Hawthorne and me”), but much to his surprise, the reluctant Hawthorne shows interest. So Hawthorne and him set off to Alderney, where there hasn’t been a murder in decades.

At first, Tony is thinking he can get one over on Hawthorne, since literary festivals and promotion are his domain, but the trip promises to be rough. The various guests don’t have much in common and a few rub Tony the wrong way. Hawthorne is charismatic enough to charm crowds and draw attention away from Tony. And casting his shadow over the gathering is the sponsor, Charles le Mesurier. Le Mesurier is a deeply unpleasant man who has history with some of the guests, cheerfully harasses them, and is the man behind an unpopular power line that’s going to be established on the island. The line will clog the island and smash through the graves of Nazi victims, so there’s plenty of bad blood directed at le Mesurier. Tony is even with him when he finds an ace of spades with a skull on it under his windshield. Not that le Mesurier is concerned. Again, there hasn’t been a murder on Alderney in decades!

After a party at his house, le Mesurier is found stabbed to death in the bunker he used for affairs. He’s been tied to a chair and then stabbed in the throat. Oddly, the killer left his right hand unbound. There’s a footprint in the blood and a coin on the floor. Alderney isn’t really equipped to handle a serious crime (and the detective in charge is lazy), so Hawthorne is asked to lend his assistance, meaning Tony will get his third book out of the trip.

There are plenty of suspects. As mentioned, quite a few members of the group wanted to stab le Mesurier before they got to the island, and he’s happy to give the stragglers a reason to do it too. As usual, Horowitz conveys all these characters with effortless ease. There’s also another man prowling around the island, the real reason Hawthorne wanted to come to Alderney. If you remember from the first book, Hawthorne was kicked off the force after he shoved a pedophile down the precinct stairs. Derek Abbott is that very man and he also has a connection to le Mesurier: He’s his financial advisor. But not for long, since one of the suspects said she heard le Mesurier planning to fire him. The confrontation between him and Hawthorne is memorable.

While I liked this book overall, I had some issues with it. This is another Horowitz where the suspects don’t get a lot of page time. This makes sense for some of them—once their big secret is revealed there’s nothing left for them to do—but some just fade out of the narrative. They feel very disconnected from each other, rarely interacting among themselves. This made sense in the previous books since the suspects really didn’t have much to do with each other already, but the island setting should have meant they were bouncing off each other more. I will give credit that their various secrets and actions on the night of the murder give the crime some texture, but that’s just on a plot level. (Which, to be fair, is what I like.) The motive didn’t hit me as hard as it could either, lacking the raw “oomph” of the previous two books. But I like how it ties into some of the oddities of the crime scene. The explanation for the unbound hand has that macabre touch that wouldn’t be out of place in Alex Rider or Horowitz Horror.

Hawthorne himself is oddly subdued. Outside of his general shadiness around Abbott, he’s not as sinister a figure, and there are less clashes between him and Tony. I don’t mind this too much—I don’t want them to argue in every book—but it stood out here. Hawthorne’s actions near the end are probably the most morally ambiguous, if not outright criminal, things he’s done all series, yet they go without much comment. Tony makes a point that he and Hawthorne traumatize multiple people and wreck lives during their investigation, and I was surprised that Horowitz didn’t do more with that idea.

All of this sounds quite negative, but I really did like the book! Horowitz is one of my favorite modern mystery writers. He does an excellent job of describing the desolate scenery of Alderney. There aren’t as many meta asides, but what is there is always interesting or amusing. (Like Tony fearing that Hawthorne won’t solve the crime before the police do because it means he doesn’t have a book, or, when Hawthorne points out he could just make it up, he protests that “Even when I’m writing fiction I try to write the truth.”) There are also plenty of clues. I admit that I felt that there weren’t as many compared to Sentence or even Moonflower Murders, but there’s enough for the armchair reader to make a good stab at the culprit. The main slip-up Hawthorne catches the killer in is a good one. It’s the kind of thing you accept at face-value and don’t question even when you get information that really should make you wonder about it. I wish there were more clues like that, but what we have is enough.

But shame on Tony for taking my intended solution and going. “Boy I sure am glad I didn’t say that in front of Hawthorne, I would have looked like an idiot.”

All in all, I enjoyed this book. While I thought that Sentence was a better book, this is still a good mystery novel. I wouldn’t start with this if you’re new to the series, but fans of Hawthorne and Horowitz will enjoy this. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, The Invisible Event, Murder at the Manse (with two others), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Stephen M. Pierce, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).