The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes (2016) by Denis O. Smith

This is actually the third time I’ve tried to read this book. This has nothing to the with its quality, but just because it’s a dense read! I never took the time to finish it.

A few years ago, I was browsing Reddit when I saw someone talking about good Sherlock Holmes pastiches. For the unaware, “pastiche” refers to a derivative work that tries to emulate the tone and feel of the original. There’s a whole bunch of Holmes ones out there and finding good ones can be a challenge. This user recommended, among other names, Denis O. Smith. I took note of that, and when I saw his collection, The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, at the library, I picked it up. Smith is a prolific writer of Holmes pastiche, with multiple collections to his name. I assume that this collection contains stories unpublished elsewhere, though I can’t be sure.

It is fair to note that Smith isn’t trying to write clever throwbacks to the Golden Age of Detection. He’s writing Sherlock Holmes pastiches. That means there’s less focus on clever mystery and more on interesting situations, nocturnal adventures, and sensational solutions. Smith does play fairer than Doyle in some ways. Usually there’s one part of the mystery that the reader can solve, such as the culprit’s identity or a code, but the rest of the solution comes from Holmes’s personal knowledge or investigations. So all of my complaints should be taken in that spirit. I judged these as mysteries because that’s my default, and I don’t want that to take away from Smith’s work here.

“The Adventure of the Black Owl” sees Holmes called upon for his expert opinion regarding the murder of Professor Arbuthnot, who was found stabbed to death in his study. Oddly, there was a black figurine of an owl on the scene. His professional rival, Dr. Zyss, was in the country and was supposed to meet up with him, but he canceled their meeting and has mysteriously vanished…though one woman claims to have seen him wander dazed into a church and then disappear! Not an impossible crime though.

This one is pretty fun. I suspect that most keen readers will at least suspect the identity of the killer. The most important clues are only obliquely mentioned by Sherlock, but there’s enough there for the reader. The ending is a little too cheery, too much “virtue rewarded” for me, but other than that I have no issues.

The titular club of “The Adventure of the XYZ Club” is a small group of university students led by Charles Churchfield, of the family of prestigious bankers. Charles’s idea of fun involves debauchery and the humiliation of his lesser, driving one of the members, Julian Ashby, to the edge of quitting. But that’s not what brings him to Holmes’s doorstep. Ashby says that he arrived at the Churchfield estate by boat late at night, crashing into a houseboat docked outside. He bumbled his way into the boathouse, lit a match to see…and caught a glimpse of a woman before being knocked out. When he came too, Charles tried to convince him that he just saw a picture of his sister that was being stored there before tripping and bumping his head, but he isn’t so sure. He’s right to be suspicious, as about a day later he’s calling on Holmes again, as the Chesterfield estate has burned to the ground with a body amidst the rubble. Holmes delivers much of the backstory behind the crime based on off-stage knowledge, but the key points of the mystery are fairly clued.

“The Adventure of the Velvet Mask” is one of the longer stories in the collection. This time, Holmes’s client is Isabel Ballantyne, the great actress. Her latest production, The Lavender Girl, has been besieged by multiple acts of sabotage. Some are just petty pranks, like one of the stars being locked in his dressing room, but others are more serious, such as the gas being switched off in the theater. One of the dressmakers came face to “face” with the culprit…seeing as he was wearing a blank piece of velvet as a mask. Even Watson encounters him in the dark corridors of the theater basement. Smith does a wonderful job of scene-setting here, really capturing the old theater the story is set in. He lacks Doyle’s knack for punchy description but is good at what he does. There is a good clue pointing to the culprit. But the sinister plot feels a little ill-thought out.

It’s a patient of Watson who brings a case in “The Adventure of the Old School Friend.” Alfred Hebert is a patient who recounts a series of odd events that have happened to him. One night, he found himself stranded in a train station where he had a chance encounter with Stephen Hollingsworth, a fellow student from his school days. The encounter is pleasant, but Hebert is in for a shock when he sees a newspaper article saying that Hollingsworth drowned a few days ago! Stephen is able to present a plausible explanation for that and begs Hebert to keep hold of a locked black bag who some shady figures are after. Bad enough, but there’s more to come. Hebert tells Watson that he was thinking on the matter in the night and was struck by a sudden realization: the man he’s been interacting absolutely cannot be Stephen Hollingsworth. When Hebert finds his way to Baker Street, it’s after he’s been badly beaten by some thugs looking for the bag. At this point, Holmes steps in and resolves it in short order. This is more of an “adventure” than a “mystery.”

The hook of “The Adventure of the Brown Box” is so good that it’s used on the blurb:“Is it really possible, do you suppose […] that a healthy and robust man may be so stricken with terror that he falls down dead?” Such is the fate of Victor Furnival, according to his niece anyway, who comes to Holmes, telling him that her uncle let out “the most dreadful cry of terror she has ever heard” upon opening a brown box he got in the mail. Her uncle isn’t the only victim of the box. Another man falls into a dead faint upon opening it, and Holmes arrives at the dead man’s house just in time to find that his sister has also perished. However, the solution is pulled right from the sensation pulps. I always find this solution creepy, and Smith has some genuine clues pointing to it, so it’s not all bad, but it might lack the needed “oomph” for some. The motive for the crimes is straight Doyle.

“The Adventure of The Tomb on the Hill” opens with Everard Dyson approaching Holmes about the theft of the titular painting. Kinda. You see, the painting was not only stolen but replaced with a near-identical copy. There are a couple of details that are different, most notably an inscription on the painted tomb, which is now totally different. When Holmes (and the reader) learns that the paintings used to belong to the brother of an infamous robber, whose last haul was never recovered and who was just released from prison, the truth becomes clear quite quickly. The reasoning for the switch is a bit handwavy; surely the culprit could have just thrown them in a fireplace. But the story is fun. You need some specialized knowledge to break the cipher, though a clever reader can figure out it’s supposed to work, and there’s a nice endgame twist to complicate the case.

“The Adventure of the Purple Hand” sees Holmes meeting with Mark Pringle about a series of small domestic mysteries. Pringle’s wife recently took on a new gardener and his wife and seems to have developed a very odd relationship with them. Pringle caught his wife embracing the gardener and laughing with the gardener’s wife. She refuses to fire the man even though there’s no actual gardening getting done. Pringle believes he overheard his wife and the gardener discussing his health and that “all our troubles will be at an end.” Not to mention the shady figure in the garden and the imprint of a six-fingered purple hand he’s been finding on his estate. This has probably the best hook in the collection, but the solution is Holmes going, “Check out all this cool stuff I learned off-page.” Which is a recurring problem in this collection: Don’t get me wrong, I like these stories, and I acknowledge that even Doyle would promise big things and then not deliver a fair-play mystery like we want. But there are a lot of stories here that have really interesting hooks but then don’t deliver with a resolution that matches up to the premise. Give Christie this premise and she would have made a minor masterpiece out of it.

“The North Walk Mystery” is set at the titular building, a place for solicitors. One rainy night, Sir Gilbert Cheshire’s body is found at his desk, his throat slashed. The place has a bloody history, and this is not the first violent death on the premises. Ten years ago, Sir John Hawkwood was bludgeoned on the doorstep, and his killer was never caught. This would normally just be a piece of morbid trivia, were it not for the fact that the dying Sir Gilbert uttered the words, “It was he…Sir John Hawkwood.” Now, Holmes knows better to believe in ghosts, though he’s just as skeptical of Inspector Stoddard’s theory that the culprit was just a prowler. Holmes does some good detection here, though again, there are no real clues pointing to the killer. And the dying message is pretty basic. But I accept that as the Doylean style.

“The Secret of Shoreswood Hall” is the other long story of the collection, and it’s a good one. Holmes is approach by a young woman, Amelia Davenoke, who wants to report the disappearance of her new husband, Edward. Edward has inherited the titular hall after the death of his father, who died suddenly while the couple was on their honeymoon. Edward rushed back to England, but when Amelia arrived, there was no trace of him. The servants tell her that he’s just in London on business, but she can find no trace of him. Not to mention that the hall is filled with strange noises at night, and Amelia has seen a figure creeping among the ruins of an old chapel. While all of these on their own could have innocent explanations, a seemingly innocuous letter from Edward tips Sherlock off that there’s something more sinister afoot.

This is a good story. “Holmes in a Gothic” is, I’m sure, very well-trodden ground in pastiches, but it works well here. There’s genuine mystery here, as well as a real sense of dread overhanging the story: “All at once I had an overpowering sensation of impending doom, an awful conviction that, do what we might, we could not protect Ameila Davenoke from the fate that awaited her.” While the mystery aspect isn’t very strong, it’s a good example of the sensation style of the original Holmes stories. The ending is also bleak, as Holmes falls short even while solving the mystery. This one justifies its length.

“The Adventure of the Minon Canon” is, fittingly, a minor story. A canon, Martin Zennor, approaches Holmes, begging for help. He stands accused of trying to steal a check from his cathedral, which was found in his coat pocket. The case against him is black, but Holmes thinks the truth lies in the game of musical chairs that the canons play with their coats. This is one of the fairer stories of the collection, as I suspect that you probably could figure it out if you sat down and plotted it out.

“The East Thirgby Mystery” is a mysterious unsolved crime. Watson recounts it to Holmes, explaining that a local eccentric and self-styled intellectual was found murdered on the road following a series of robberies in the district. Watson bemoans that no one knows the truth, but Holmes corrects him. One man does know: Sherlock Holmes. It turns out that Holmes vacationed in the area in childhood, and he recounts his experiences leading up to the murder. “Kid Holmes” has a lot of ways it can go wrong, but to Smith’s credit, the picture he draws is charming without being cloying or precious. Young Holmes is clever but not yet infallible. Some parts of the mystery aren’t used to their fullest—I think here of the “sinister stranger” lurking in the area—but the Holmes’s conclusions about what happened the night of the crime are solid and logical.

We end with “The Adventure of Juniper Cottage.” Holmes’s client this time is Sidney Potter, a clerk who has just inherited a cottage from his uncle, a military man. The cottage is pleasant and in a peaceful area but recently has received some unwelcome guests. Robbers have apparently been inside looking his and just recently Mr. Potter found his home invaded by an unknown man who was likely looking for something and might be stalking him even now. Holmes steps in and quickly finds what the robbers are searching for. This is a weak story to end on, with a pretty simple mystery, although there is a bit of code cracking that a clever reader can work out on their own.

I know I did a lot of griping about this book, but I did enjoy it. Like I said, these aren’t meant to be elaborate mysteries you can solve on your own. There’s some of that, but you’re mostly sitting back and watching Holmes at work. Smith lacks Doyle’s effortless command of language, but he does a very good job at emulating Victorian narratives. So, if you want classic, fair-play mysteries, I would look elsewhere. But if you want to lose yourself in Victorian gaslight and walk the streets with two of the greatest characters in all of mystery fiction, I would give this a shot. Sit in a nice chair in front of a fireplace and read a story a night. You’ll enjoy it. Recommended.

Danganronpa Kirigiri 1 (2013/2019) by Takekuni Kitayama (translated by Kamase Megane and "kanan is love")

I read this book for the Honkaku Discord server’s book club. 

If you’re someone who plays mystery games, then you have doubtless heard of the Danganronpa franchise. The series is set in a world of “Ultimates,” masters of their certain talent: Idol Singer, Chef, Scion, etc. The main series games involve groups of these teenagers being kidnapped and forced to play a murder game by the robotic bear Monokuma. Kill your classmate, and they’ll be a Class Trial. If the others solve it, the “Blackened” will be executed. If they can’t, the culprit goes free and the others are executed. You know, fun school activities.

I mentioned in my review of The “Lapis Lazuli Castle” Murders that author Takekuni Kitayama really rose to prominence thanks to his work on the Danganronpa series. The Danganronpa Kirigiri series is one of his contributions. It’s a prequel to the main series, starring Kyoko Kirigiri from the first game as a middle schooler. Though she’s not our viewpoint character. No, instead, the book opens with narrator and teen detective Yui Samidare waking up handcuffed to a bed. She’s trapped in picturesque (“depairesque”) Sirius Observatory. She and four other detectives were invited to the observatory by an unknown client, before suddenly passing out. Yui quickly frees herself and searches the place, stumbling on an unconscious Kyoko…with a bloody pair of shears next to her. The reason for that blood becomes clear on further searching: The other three detectives lie dead in their beds. Decapitated. And dismembered. And with the body parts swapped around.

Complicating matters is that the observatory is totally cut off from the outside world thanks to heavy snowfall, and there’s no trace of anyone else in the building. Therefore, the killer must either be the narrator, or the girl the series is named after.

But little do our heroines know that the observatory has been chosen as the stage for the Duel Noir. A shady organization known as the “Victims’ Catharsis Committee” is approaching the victims of crime and offering them an opportunity to get “catharsis,”…revenge on those who’ve wronged them. The client gets the weapons, location, and even the tricks for a fee, which can be paid for with sponsorships from the Committee. An itemized list of these items is sent to a detective (in this case, Yui, although she didn’t know the context) as a challenge. If they can’t solve the crime within 168 hours, the Committee will give the client a new identity to live in peace. If not, they expect to be paid back. In full.

Danganronpa Kirigiri is that rare mystery that combines the closed circle and the locked room. As I said, Sirius Observatory is cut off from the outside world, but at the same time, the only possible culprits are our heroines. Kirigiri touched the killer’s hand before being knocked out, but that doesn’t help them much. I believe that most savvy readers will at least suspect the trick the killer used, but Kitayama cleverly throws in enough complications to obscure just how they did it. And the answer is very good. Is it fair play? Mostly. I knew part of the solution going in and picked up on the clues for that part of it, but I would be surprised if most readers really solved it. It requires some lateral thinking. Though I’ll concede that I breezed over a key point because I thought I knew the whole trick. I admit I was skeptical about that part of it when Kirigiri explained it, but after looking up some details, I’m willing to give Kitayama the benefit of the doubt here.

My main complaint is that the book is quite short. It’s just over 130 pages, and a fair bit of those pages are spent on set-up, explaining the backstory, and looking at Yui and Kyoko’s investigation into the Committee once the dust has settled. So the actual mystery falls by the wayside a bit. The one-shot characters are also pretty whatever; if it weren’t for the (very good) illustrations I wouldn’t be able to describe them at all. Yui and Kyoko fare better. Yui is fun but doesn’t exactly get to strut her detective bonefides here. And maybe it was just me, but I had a hard time picturing Kyoko as a middle-schooler, which made her come off as quite bland instead of the stoic and brilliant girl with a trolling streak from the games.

But you know what? I still enjoyed this book. It’s a good mystery and both the main mystery and the “Duel Noir” are excellent hooks. Outside of a couple of mentions of “despair,” “talent,” “Hope’s Peak Academy,” and a few other references, there’s really no connection to the wider Danganronpa franchise, so you can enjoy this even if you’re not familiar with the series. If this sounds intriguing, or if you just like Kitayama, this comes Recommended.

You can find the translation *here.

 

The Night My Friend (1992) by Edward D. Hoch (edited by Francis M. Nevins)

It’s been a while since I last looked at a non-series Hoch collection. That book, The Future is Ours, didn’t impress me and I’ve stuck to his series fiction since. But recently I’ve decided to really sit down and read all those various Hoch collections out there. Hence today’s book, The Night My Friend. According to editor Nevins, this “celebrates the unfamiliar side of his output,” with more of a focus on stories of crime and suspense than mystery. Though there’s plenty of that too. 

The darker tone is clear from the first story, “Twilight Thunder.” During WWII, Dale Fielding and some of his fellow soldiers fragged an unpopular commanding officer. Well, to be exact, the other two fragged him, Dale didn’t do anything. Now one of his old war buddies is in town and talking blackmail. Dale hems and haws but decides there’s nothing to it but to arrange a “hunting accident”… Good story, and the ending is thematically appropriate, but I don’t know if the other man would be so willing to just walk away.

The title story introduces us to Johnny Noctune, a songwriter who sometimes rides with the cops at night, looking for inspiration. This means he’s on the scene when a young woman wearing only a coat runs up, collapses, and utters the name of Cotton Cravess, a newspaperman turned politician, before dying. Johnny is later summoned (read: kidnapped) to Cotton’s office where he gives an explanation of the girl’s death that puts him legally in the clear but would spell the doom of his campaign. So when one of the cops present when the girl died is shot to death, Johnny steps in. That being said, the mystery part is weak. Johnny’s logic boils down to “vibes.” But speaking of vibes, this has some good ones. I read this—and a lot of the other stories—late at night while in a slightly melancholic mood, and Hoch really captures the appeal of the night.

The next two stories are short ones. “The Suitcase” is a bitter-bit story about a farmer who takes a suitcase from the wreckage of a plane crash. His wife convinces him to bury it behind their barn, but he just can’t stop thinking about what could be in there…well-written, if conventional. The narrator of “The Picnic People” crashes a picnic to meet with some old friends. At first, things just seem a little off and passive-aggressive, but it soon becomes clear that our narrator hasn’t met up with these people because he’s been in an institution after killing a girl…I was worried Hoch was going to take this a dark direction. But it feels like just a vignette, part of a longer narrative that just ends. Reminds me of the stories I didn’t like from Future.

Speaking of picnics, “Day for a Picnic” is one of the few genuine mystery stories here. The narrator reminiscences about a wonderful month with his grandfather in the country, the highlight of which was the annual picnic. Well, it was a highlight for different reasons than you might expect, as a rising politician in that little town died after drinking from a poisoned mug of beer. No one could have poisoned his glass after it was poured, and others drank from the pitcher without a problem. I suspect most readers will quickly leap to both the solution and murderer, but I still liked how carefully Hoch clued it.

Speaking of clues, I was impressed with “Shattered Rainbow.” O’Bannion quits his job in a fit of anger and is stuck trolling for a new one. Meanwhile, a man named Green steals a necklace and kills a man. Obviously, destiny will bring them into each other’s paths. Green needs someone to take some “candy” over the Canadian border, and O’Bannion is feeling quite desperate. I shouldn’t have been surprised at how it all unfolded, and I was kicking myself for missing some of the hints. A good story.

Carley is “The Patient Waiter,” a man who is always waiting, waiting, waiting. He waits on customers for his job, he waits for the right chances to come along. He also waits for his clients, business owners whose businesses are failing and who need insurance money fast. This is another Hoch tale about an isolated loner wandering unknown through life, and while the ending is a bit silly, the story as a whole touched me.

“Too Long at the Fair” sees tax attorney Sam Clinton trekking up to the titular fair, which is currently in the off-season. He’s looking for a General Spindler, the head of the Noahites, an eccentric group who believe that Noah and his ark came from space. Clinton is here because the Noahites’ meeting place was written on a piece of paper in the pocket of one of his clients…who was shot and burned. Once again, I missed an obvious clue and was kicking myself for it; it elevated the story for me.

I’d first heard of “Winter Run” in a review from Mystery*File, where a comment mentioned how this story, which was first published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, it was darker than the kinds of stories Hoch tended to write for EQMM. And that was right. The protagonist, a cop, shoots a man and quits the force. He and his girlfriend go up north, where he gets a job as a security guard for a sleepy resort. It’s easy work and easy money, but he soon runs into his predecessor on the job, who was fired for sleeping with some of the ladies at the resort. And his own girlfriend is growing distant…A well-written story with a slight shock at the ending.

“The Long Way Down” is the highlight of his collection for mystery fans. Billy Calm is the mighty head of Jupiter Steel, which is heading into an advantageous merger. But something seems to be wrong with Calm. He’s late for a meeting one foggy morning, and when he does show up, he enters the directors’ meeting room and jumps out the window. His security chief, McLove, rushes to the street to find…nothing. No glass. No body. Calm has vanished into the fog. The rest of the board run around to try and resolve the financial side while McLove tries to figure out what happened to the body. Like the best of Hoch’s mystery fiction, the cluing is very well done, and the possible fake solutions are all shot down by details you see in the story. The solution is pretty good too. I have to wonder if the culprit would really come up with this plan on short notice, but it’s a clever explanation. I wasn’t super impressed with this when I read it for the New Locked Room Library, but I enjoyed it much more this time.

“Dreaming is a Lonely Thing” introduces us to Dave Krown and his girlfriend, Helen Reston. Helen isn’t brilliant or pretty (c’mon Hoch), but she does have a unique gift: She dreams, dreams of clever criminal plots and almost seems to have precognition. Dave finds this a useful gift in his line of work, but Helen is getting antsy about walking away from crime, and Dave is too much of a gambler to ever really stop. Then, during one robbery, he meets Susan Brogare, who figures out who he is and wants to meet up. She becomes fascinated by him, and soon she and Dave are meeting much more often. But Helen and her dreams, literal and figurative, are in the way. Most will see the ending coming, but it’s still a solid and dreamy (hah!) story.

“In Some Secret Place” is similar in set-up to “Day for a Picnic,” also being narrated by a young boy recounting an incident in his youth. Here, it’s the funeral for his Uncle Ben (no relation to Peter Parker), who toppled off a tractor one night and hit his head on a rock, probably while drunk. Or so it seems. The sheriff has his own ideas about what happened out there in that field. And the narrator’s Uncle Charlie has some ideas of his own. The mystery isn’t really that strong. There are some good clues but some parts of the explanation feel like the detective is just saying stuff. Still, I liked it.

“To Slay an Eagle” is a good example of Hoch’s surprisingly cynical espionage fiction. The eagle in question is the oddly named Colonel China, who’s been looting German art in the ruins of (fictional) Augshiem to fund a neo-Nazi movement. Our protagonist, Visor, has been tasked with killing him. Visor is something of an eagle himself. During the war, he led a bombing raid on Augshiem, and he exploits that experience to get close to the Colonel. The colonel’s death is a bit of an anti-climax, and you could argue that the ending is too suddenly dark.

“They Never Come Back” has a premise straight out of a Harlan Coben novel. Harry Gordon is in a violent car crash that bangs him up and leaves his wife a charred corpse. Horrible enough, but then the wife of one of his friends says that she’s alive. And then Harry thinks he sees someone like her in the city, although he’s disabused of that. And then the note arrives:“Please help me. I didn’t die in the accident.” It’s a great premise, but the final explanation is a letdown, especially since one of the clues is too obvious. (ROT13: Abeznyyl V jbhyq svaq vg naablvat, ohg urer V jbhyqa’g unir zvaqrq n fyvtug fhcreangheny nfcrpg jvgu gur sevraq’f jvsr whfg cynva frrvat n tubfg.)

“The Only Girl in His Life” sees George Granger meeting up with old friend Harold Beach. Beach has a request for George: To track down Harold’s runaway wife Linda and deliver some jewelry and clothing. George is reluctant at first but eventually decides to track this hard-to-find woman down. Good story, and the ending caught me off guard this time.

Like “Too Long at the Fair,” “It Happens, Sometimes” is set at one. This one is more active though, and protagonist Craidy—another loner—is in charge of fixing the machines at the arcade. Craidy has lived a quiet life, but this time lets himself be pulled away by the fair’s “psychic,” Rita, to watch a boxing match. But the champion throws the fight, and the newcomer is found beaten to death in an alley. In spite of the summary, this isn’t a mystery at all. There’s no doubt about what happened, it’s just the various characters deciding what to do about it. It’s not bad, but this time the bleak ending comes out of nowhere.

The narrator of “A Girl Like Cathy” runs into, well, a girl like Cathy, his ex-girlfriend, in a Greenwich Village shop. The two strike up a friendship, and before long, Laura has talked him into helping her with a job. Specifically, stealing a jeweled chalice from a rebuilt chapel. The central idea is good, but alas! Hoch used this plan as an anecdote in a Nick Velvet story, so I knew what was coming. But I don’t blame him. It’s a good idea.

“What’s It All About?” is the shortest story of the collection, about a serial hit-and-run driver. It’s a chilling picture of a psychopath that doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

Next up is “First Offense.” This time, our hero is an angsty seventeen-year-old who spends his time at the drug store, chasing girls, and wishing he had a car so he can get out of his small town. That’s how he gets sucked into an older boy’s plan to rob some bank clerks while they’re transporting money. It’s not a bad plan, really... Hoch captures teenage ennui and naivety quite well, and the ending is good.

“Hawk in the Valley” is about another loner, this one a traveling harmonica boy who makes his way into a small town in the valley, looking for a job playing. He finds one but clashes with another player and kills him in his home, before being brought down by a single mistake.

I wasn’t sure if I’d like “The Ring with the Velvet Ropes,” but it was actually one of my favorites from the collection. Jim Figg is a boxer on the verge of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. He sallies forth, uncaring about the rumors of the real champion, Roderik Blanco. Turns out that Blanco is very real. His men kidnap Jim and bring him to Blanco’s mansion. Blanco is a rich man obsessed with boxing, but he’ll lose his trust fund if he’s ever caught fighting. So he has a boxing ring in his home and makes a habit of duking it out with the latest champion. He’s never lost yet, but Jim can take him. Of course, Blanco might not take defeat well…While I think the way Jim gets out of this mess is weak—there’s no way Blanco would go for it or accept defeat like that—I really enjoyed this story. It’s just so weird that I can’t help but like this very unusual thriller.

The collection ends with “Homecoming,” where the old boys—those that survived the war, anyway—come back to their old high school. Most of them haven’t done great things in their lives, but Mark Wedmer has. The perpetual victim of bullying, he’s become a big-name Wall Street man now, and he wants to make sure everyone knows it. His bullies certainly take notice. A downer ending for a downer collection.

While the mystery content is pretty minimal, I actually enjoyed The Night My Friend. Part of it was my mindset while reading. Like I said, Hoch was fascinated by loners—good and bad—who thrive best in the night. As a loner who enjoys the night myself, I was often drawn into these stories and their melancholia. While I wouldn’t recommend this for those who care about the mystery and nothing but the mystery, for anyone who wants to walk in the sometimes gentle, sometimes bleak night, this is well worth your time. Recommended.

The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933) by Stuart Palmer

Stuart Palmer’s fourth Hildegarde Withers book, The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree, is set on the island of Catalina, a vacation destination for Depression-afflicted America. Our story doesn’t begin on the island, however, but on the mainland. A man misses the boat to the island and reluctantly gets aboard the “flying boat” the Dragonfly. It’s quicker, but the turbulence is a killer. Possibly literally. For barely five minutes into the flight, the man begins to panic, screaming “I’m dying—I don’t want to die!” By the time the plane lands, he’s dead. The local doctor and police chief, who’ve barely seen any crime, much less murder, for years are willing to write the death off as natural causes, a heart attack from the stress. Unfortunately for the killer, one of the tourists on Catalina is schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers, who insists that the death is a murder. Her claims gain some force when the dead man’s identity is discovered: Roswell T. Forrest, a secretary who’s wanted back in New York by the police for testimony against his corrupt union bosses. Said bosses want him quiet, and they’re willing to pay $15,000 to make it happen.

Miss Withers will have to sort the killer out from the melting pot of people on board the Dragonfly. There’s a newly-wed couple, a director and his two assistants, a ship captain, a pottery seller, the pilots, and a young woman with dreams of stardom who becomes Miss Withers’s pseudo-Watson. Most of them are strangers to each other, much less the dead man, but $15,000 in 1930s money is motive enough. But there are other problems: How could anyone have poisoned Forrest on a crowded flight that he didn’t even plan to be on? Complicating matters further is that someone makes off with his body in the night. There’s no trace of it on the island even though there’s seemingly no place to bury it. And no, it wasn’t dumped in the ocean. Separated from dependable Oscar Piper of NYPD, Miss Withers will have to go this alone.

And it’s that aspect of going it alone that’s the main draw of the book. The previous book in this series, Murder on the Blackboard, toyed with having Miss Withers cut off from her normal support group, but this takes it further. Not only does Miss Withers not have any real allies, but it’s an uphill battle convincing the authorities that there’s even been a murder at all. Miss Withers gets pretty hardboiled here, even holding a gun on one of the suspects! But at the same time, Palmer subverts expectations a little bit here. Miss Withers’s stunt with a gun doesn’t really gain her anything and the whole chapter has her off-guard and flummoxed. When she does find herself face to face with an actual hardened criminal, she’s easily overpowered and almost killed. There’s this sense that the case might be a bit too much for her, at least on her own. I don’t think Palmer is using this as commentary on women being too weak for detective work or anything, but it feels like he’s trying to put Miss Withers in different circumstances and see how she reacts. It gives the book some interest for long-time readers.

Sadly, that’s probably the best part of the book. The actual mystery didn’t satisfy me. The explanation for the poisoning is fine. Similar to Murder on Wheels, Palmer is smart enough to know that the reader will likely figure out how it was done and reveals it early on. The location of the missing body is obvious but also clever. But the rest falls short. Near the end of the book there’s another death, a shooting. All of the suspects are tested for gunpowder residue, but no trace is found. Sadly, the explanation for how the killer managed to do this is just a trivia fact. And even when Miss Withers does point at the killer, there’s like, one clue pointing to them. It’s a good clue, yes, but it’s one clue! I agree with Dead Yesterday’s review that the killer really could have been any of the suspects.

All in all, while this was a good read, I found it to be a very weak mystery. I liked the island setting and seeing Palmer putting Miss Withers outside of her comfort zone. But the actual mystery wasn’t to my taste. I’m giving this a Not Recommended, With Caveats. If you like Miss Withers or Palmer’s writing, then this is worth a look because of how he plays with the formula. But if you’ve never read one of his books, or if you’re reading solely for the mystery aspect, you’d be better off picking another book from this series.

Other Reviews: Dead Yesterday, Bitter Tea and Mystery, The Grandest Game in the World.

A Fête Worse Than Death (2007) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

As has become clear by now, I really enjoy the works of Dolores Gordon-Smith. Her books make a genuine effort to emulate the Golden Age novels of yore, and even when she falls short, she still gives a charmingly written and dense mystery to chew on. I decided to go back to the beginning of her Jack Haldean series to enjoy it in full.

A Fête Worse Than Death opens at the village fête, run by Jack’s aunt, Alice. He’s enjoying the festivities, aside from the heat, but runs into a fly in the ointment: Jeremy Boscome, a former fellow officer. Boscome was only in the Royal Air Force to escape the front lines of World War I and was a notorious nuisance. A reputation he lives up to here, getting drunk, making insinuations, and being a pest, before crashing in the fortune teller’s tent to sleep it off. He’s seemingly left alone in there, but when someone peeks in, they find that he’s been shot in the head.

This murder is soon followed up by one of Boscome’s compatriots catching a bullet to the head in his hotel room. Luckly for Jack, the investigator in charge, Superintendent Edward Ashley, has heard about his previous work in crime solving and is willing to let him assist. Boscome was a vulture who had a nasty habit of prodding people’s emotional weaknesses, and Jack suspects he was making money off of blackmail. But against who? The truth lies in Boscome’s memoirs, where he recounts how a traitorous officer led good men into a German ambush in the tunnels under the battlefield…

Gordon-Smith does a good job here. There’s plenty of mystery and intrigue. There’s a love triangle of sorts. Marguerite Vayle has fallen for a war hero with movie star looks, Colonel Whitfield, but one of her trustees, Hugh Larwrence, opposes the marriage on the grounds that the colonel comes off as a gold-digger. There’s also shady parentage, more murders, the works. She evens hints at an impossible crime with Boscome’s death. It seems, if not impossible, certainly very unlikely that anyone could have slipped into the tent and shot him without being seen or heard. She doesn’t make much of this (although the clue that explains it is what breaks the case for Haldean), but I wanted to make a note of it. I predicted some of the plot twists in advance, but I can see someone less familiar with her work not reaching the same conclusions I did. The mystery isn’t as complex as her later ones, but there’s still plenty of theorizing for characters and reader alike to chew on.

If I have any complaints, it’s that the cluing is, again, a little weak. Haldean points out multiple little indications during his explanation at the end, and fair enough. While reading the explanation, I was impressed at how easily Gordon-Smith slotted the killer’s actions into earlier parts of the book. But those elements really only point to the killer after you know who they are. You can’t look at them and deduce who the killer is from them. I also think that there needed to be one or two more suspects for the reader to, er, suspect. Now, part of this is just the fact that I’ve read enough of Gordon-Smith to get a feel for how she constructs her stories, but the killer stood out to me here. She does a good job of spreading suspicion around, but I think another potential killer would have served her well.

All in all, while this isn’t my favorite of Gordon-Smith’s novels, it is still a good read. Remember that this was her first book and that she would get much better. You could certainly do worse than starting here if you’re prowling around looking for a new author. Recommended for anyone looking for good historical mysteries. 

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Invisible Event, My Reader's Block.

Turnabout Retribution (2023) by The Fury Wraith

I almost didn’t review this.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the fancase, which is quite good, and more with the premise. One of the reasons I haven’t reviewed more AA fancases before now is because I knew there would be a hurdle for those who hadn’t played AA before. I did A Game of Turnabouts because it’s pretty simple and doesn’t depend on knowing the plot of the AA games. But Turnabout Retribution, a fancase by The Fury Wraith, is different. The very premise of the case is a massive spoiler.

The plot revolves around the antagonist of the fourth game, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. The game opens with our hero about to face justice, when they’re suddenly transported to Hell. By the Devil. Who has an offer for our protagonist, because they’re just that much of a scumbag (“…Plus I think someone might have seen me appear on your hand in that one court case…”) The Devil will send our hero 24 hours before the court case that spelled their downfall. If they can avert their fate, they can live a full life. Fail, and the Devil gets their soul now instead of later. But that task is harder than it looks. In short, even if our hero finds a simple solution, there’s a ticking time bomb in the background that will ruin them anyway. The Devil happily leads them to the only real solution: Kill Phoenix Wright.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Phoenix is very safe for the full 24 hours. He was attending a poker tournament at a run-down casino, only for the dealer, one Roy Elflash (ugh) to wind up dead in his safe with a knife in his back. Luckily, the police already have a suspect in custody: one of the players, Bethany Ittal (ahhhhhh). She was caught in the locked safe with a bagful of money, and seeing as the dead man had the only key in his hand, there’s no way it could be anyone other than her (“It’s like one of those locked-room mysteries in novels. Only with an obvious culprit!”) However, our hero can’t let that stand. If they can’t lure Phoenix Wright into a blind alley to smash a bottle over his head, they’ll do the next best thing: Take Bethany’s case, and frame Phoenix for the murder.

Turnabout Retribution does a pretty good job at matching the Ace Attorney vibe. It’s not perfect; some of the contradiction logic is wonky, but for the most part this is a reasonable pastiche of an AA case. There’s only one original character, an actress participating in the tournament, but she’s good. Her gimmick is just the right level of annoying and her skill at brushing off contradictions makes her a formidable opponent in court. The mystery is good too. I found the contradictions were usually reasonable but sometimes quite hard, especially at the beginning and about two-thirds of the way through the case. One of the big contradictions in particular is tricky, because I can see players dismissing it as a limitation of the engine, but when taken in context, it’s clever.

The reason I highlighted this case is because the locked room is great. If I were to describe the solution flat-out you’d think it was stupid, but it’s very well done. It’s so silly, but it’s very well-justified. It feels like an Ace Attorney-style solution, with an idea that sounds absurd on paper until you start thinking about it... There are proper clues pointing to it (in fact, when I replayed the case, I wondered how I missed it) and I like how the case leads you to the bizarre but very creative truth.

The main hook for AA fans is the protagonist and their relationship with Phoenix. Let me start by saying that I think they’re a little too easily flustered. This character is usually portrayed as smooth and in-control, and they have a few too many freak-outs for me. Sure, you can argue it’s like Phoenix in Turnabout Revolution where he seems much more confident when you’re not getting his internal monologue, and the case does throw our hero curveball after curveball, but it didn’t sit right with me. I also didn’t 100% buy the face-turn you can have them make at the end. But I liked how the case handled Phoenix. This will mainly be of interest to those who are familiar with the fanon surrounding Apollo Justice-era Phoenix. While I found this less subtle on my second playthrough, I think case does something interesting with that and really plays with how fans view the battle of wits between our hero and Phoenix. It avoids a common cliché in AA fanon.

Of course, the case then does something I don’t like to see in fancases, but that’s more me.

All in all, Turnabout Retribution is really good! The hook is interesting, the mystery is very clever, and the characters are all great. I do think that you’ll get the most out of this if you’ve played Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney first. But if all you’re looking for is a new locked room mystery, you could do a lot worse than this. Recommended. 

You can play the case here. 

A Eulogy for Reason (2019) by DWaM

A delivery girl brings a package to a shady apartment. A woman goes on a date with a man she met online…and plans to rob him. A desperate man tries to make money for his daughter with a pyramid scheme (“T-triangle”). And the police investigate a brutal locked room mystery. And there’s even more going on in the city besides. It all sounds overwhelming. But just relax. The Inspector is coming.

And remember that the date is always April 17th, 2028.

Such is the set-up of DWaM’s A Eulogy for Reason. I admit, I was tentative going into this, unsure if I’d vibe with it, but there was nothing to worry about. Beneath the slightly unusual narrative structure is a very good, if nightmarish, mystery story. There’s a bombing, a cult that wears animal masks, and a book, The Inspector’s Arrival, that seems to predict the future and definitely mirrors the major crime. We get multiple perspectives on this fateful day (and following morning). There’s a fair bit of dark humor here (one of the narrators mocks conspiracy theorists online but proves to be more paranoid than any of them, one viewpoint character is a detective who gives a Lenny Briscoe-style one-liner and keeps apologizing for it for the rest of his chapter). Even if it's not clear how at first, most of the narrators fill in some piece of what happened on that fateful April 17th, 2028.

Oh, and one of the narrators dreams that a giant hand is coming out of the sky. There’s that too.

But what about the locked room? I hear you cry. Fear not, for there are two here. Kinda. One is fictional, contained within The Inspector’s Arrival. Both have a woman set on fire in her bedroom, which is not only locked from the inside, but taped. The solutions are pretty good. I liked the in-universe one a little better. It relies on some unusual behavior but is the right amount of twisted for me. The main locked room is still good though, not so much for the how but for the why, which connects the murder to a lot of the other weirdness going on throughout the novella.

Because, in the end, this is a pretty well thought out mystery. The multiple perspectives might seem confusing, but most of the connections are made pretty clear early on. I was impressed by how smoothly everything linked together. I’d hesitate a bit to call Eulogy a fully fair mystery. I would be shocked if anyone solved this 100%, since some of the smaller details are mentioned in passing and you really aren’t given the context to recognize their relevance. But those who pay attention and take careful notes can make it 85-90% of the way there. Come the explanation, we see that every key point was at least mentioned earlier, so the ending still feels satisfying. It may not be perfectly clued, but it is well-foreshadowed.

All in all, this was another great mystery from DWaM, and probably my favorite of his stuff that I’ve read so far. This may not be a traditional mystery, but it is a real one. Fans of Kitayama’s The “Lapis Lazul Castle” Murders who are craving something with that same sense of a mystery that takes place on the edge of reality might want to check this out. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event.

Strange Buildings (2023/2026) by Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion)

I didn’t plan to review this book so soon after it’s prequel, but my library gave me both when I checked Strange Houses out.

As it’s Japanese title, Hen na le 2, implies, Strange Buildings is a sequel to Strange Houses. The publication of the latter book has resulted in a flood of people contacting Uketsu to tell him about their own weird houses. Most of these don’t have an explanation (“I couldn’t bring those stories to an end.”), but there are some that do have answers…and connections. Strange Buildings collects eleven “files” that turn out to have far-reaching links.

I won’t talk about each file in detail; there are other reviews for that. Instead, I must give Uketsu credit for changing things up for this book. Houses used the same basic set up for each of it’s stories. Buildings mixes it up. There’s the conventional floorplan/interview format where the author has to examine houses with weird bits, like a dead end hallway, but there’s also the journal of a young boy subject to horrifying abuse, an exposé on a cult, a historical account of a mill house in the woods. There’s a little more variety to the mysteries as well. Two of the files are linked accounts of a fatal house fire. In another, a man finds that his house is listed on an app for “Incident Properties” “places where bad things have happened,” but his house was built after the date on the app. Most of the files follow the script format of Houses, but the variety in the storytelling gives the book some more life.

Strange Buildings is stronger as both a mystery and a horror novel than its predecessor. On the mystery side, it’s very well-clued. Most of the files have the author presenting an explanation or answering some kind of question, but there’s usually some hanging detail that he can’t explain. The last chapter has best bro Kurihara examine the files himself and connect all this mystery and bloodshed. And it’s good! Just about every twist has some sort of cluing or foreshadowing. The summation even has exact quotes from earlier in the book! I know that some people don’t like Uketsu’s illustration/recap heavy style, and I don’t disagree, but it works really well here and keeps everything clear. There’s even cluing for the big connection between the files, even if it does require some abstract thinking. The connection is weird and creative and hilarious and deeply cynical and kinda gross all at once. Some of it doesn’t work for me (ROT13: fheryl fbzr bs gubfr ubhfrf qba’g ybbx gung zhpu yvxr gur Ubyl Zbgure?), but for the most part I was willing to buy into it. I also had a problem with some of the smaller mysteries, (ROT13: Va Svyr 1, V sryg gung gur rkcynangvba sbe Lnlbv’f zbgure’f orunivbe qvqa’g jbex jryy. Fheryl n orggre rkcynangvba jbhyq or ure srne gung ure “puvyq bs fva” jbhyq or chavfurq, rfcrpvnyyl fvapr n xvq npghnyyl qvq qvr bhgfvqr ure ubhfr? Gur oybbq glcr vqrn sryg gbb qvfpbaarpgrq.) And in File 5 (qb jr rire yrnea jub chg gur ubhfr ba Vapvqrag Ncc naq jul?) Finally, the structure of the book means that the mastermind behind all this bloodshed gets less page time than a bit character. I accept it as a necessity of the culture, but it’s worth noting. And why was chapter 4 written in present tense?

And the horror aspects are better. Much “better.” I didn’t find Houses all that scary, but this book goes to some genuinely dark places. While there’s nothing graphic on-page, Uketsu pulls no punches. It fits with the cynical tone of the book. Just about every relationship or seemingly good deed is exposed as a sham, with something much darker behind it. It gets kinda comical, especially at the end, where Ukestu gives you a plot twist, then subverts it a page later just to set up the bleak ending. I didn’t feel that any of this was sleazy or overly exploitative, but I could see some readers finding the content distasteful.

In the end, I still enjoy Strange Pictures the best out of Uketsu’s work. It’s the best as a novel. But I can’t deny that Strange Buildings addresses every issue I had with Houses and is a massive improvement. If you completely bounced off Houses I don’t think this will make you a fan, but if you thought that Houses was good but flawed, or just thought the concept was neat, Strange Buildings is very much worth your time. If you’re a fan of mystery and horror in general, you should check it out. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Stephen M. Pierce, Beneath the Stains of Time, The Library at Borley Rectory, A Weekly Dose of Architectural Books, Fang's Mystery Blog.

Driysham 2 (2022) written and directed by Jeethu Joseph

Earlier this year, I reviewed the Malayali movie Drishyam (Visual) and really enjoyed it. It was a solid crime drama about a father trying to help his family after his eldest daughter accidentally killed a rapist. And the central alibi could have pulled right out the Golden Age. So it was with some interest that some friends and I sat down to watch Drishyam 2.

The movie takes place seven years after the events of the previous one. Georgekutty and his family are doing pretty well, all things considered. Georgekutty is now the owner of a movie theater where he gets to show off his favorite movies and is even working on a film of his own (though the production is going quite slow, to his wife’s frustration.) The family now lives in a nicer house. Georgekutty even has fancy CCTV at the theater and his old TV repair shop. Youngest daughter Anu is in her rebellious teenager phase, but she’s making friends at her school. There’s even hope of marrying off Anju, the eldest. Yes, life is looking very good for Georgekutty.

But there are shadows darkening the family’s lives. Anju suffers from nightmares and seizures from the trauma of Varun’s murder. Anu’s love interest has an unhealthy interest in the murder. Georgekutty’s newfound success breeds resentment among his neighbors, who are now more willing to believe that his family was involved in Varun’s murder, and it’s affecting his daughter’s marriage prospects. And the police haven’t given up trying to nail the family.

And unbeknownst to anyone, Georgekutty was seen that fateful night. The witness was arrested that same night and doesn’t quite realize the implications of what he saw, but he’s a desperate man, and there’s a reward offered for any information on Varun’s body…

After finishing the movie, my first thought was that I didn’t like it as much as the first one. But that’s a little unfair. Drishyam 2 is better paced than its predecessor. It’s still about an hour before the plot really kicks off, but there’s more intrigue since we know about the Sword of Damocles over the family’s head. And the midpoint has a really good twist that recontextualizes what we’ve seen so far.

My main issue was with the structure of the film, which really isn’t its fault. The original Driysham had a really fascinating cat-and-mouse game and central problem (How did Georgekitty fake an alibi?) Here, the tension comes from Georgekutty being oblivious to the tightening net around him, meaning we’re tapping our fingers waiting for it all to explode. This means, however, that the counterplays are all confined to the last half-hour of the movie. They are foreshadowed, but, like the first film, not in a way where you can watch and predict what the endgame will be.

And don’t get me wrong, the endgame is great. But it lacks the sheer impact of the first movie. To be as vague as possible about both: In the first film, Georgekutty beats the police in part because he’s able to manipulate them into destroying their own case. He knows how they think and act and exploits that. When he wins, it feels like well-deserved karma. Here, his plan boils down to "lie,” with his machinations meant to make that lie plausible. And they are good machinations, but because we’re not given the same insight into what he’s doing, they lack some oomph. It just felt implausible to me that he was able to get the police off his back with this plan, even if one of the main ideas is really clever. Maybe it would have helped if, after we get the evidence that “proves” his family is innocent, we were given a few minutes to see the aftermath and wonder how he managed to pull it off, but instead we get the moment and the explanation right after that.

Really, I’m just complaining that nothing can beat the final shot of the previous film.

There are also a couple of loose ends. The bit with Anu’s boyfriend being interested in the murder goes nowhere. The resentment towards Georgekutty from his neighbors also doesn’t impact anything, which is a missed opportunity in my view. Georgekutty’s plan in the previous film hinged on public sympathy, and it would have been interesting to see him try and account for a lack of it this time around.

But again, most of this is just me disappointed that I didn’t get the movie I wanted to watch. In the end, I have to give Jeethu Joseph credit for making a sequel that really does feel like a plausible outcome of first film. If you liked Drishyam and want to see Georgekutty win again, this is a solid sequel. Just keep in mind that this is a different film. Recommended.

Three Card Murder (2023) by J. L. Blackhurst

Back in 2023, the Puzzle Doctor reviewed Three Card Murder, a new book by J. L. Blackhurst. That's actually the pen name of Jenny Blackhurst, a writer of psychological thrillers. Three Card Murder, by contrast, was a colorful reference to the Golden Age of mystery fiction, complete with three(!) locked rooms. It sounded promising. But it wasn’t until the Honkaku Discord server chose it as a book club book that I finally got around to reading it.

Three Card Murder stars Tess Fox, a newly-appointed Detective Inspector looking to cut her teeth on a murder case. The murder is that of Shaun Mitchell, who crashed to the ground outside of his apartment building. He’s partly been bound with rope and his throat slit. But when Tess and her team enter his filthy apartment, they quickly realize they have a problem: The CCTV camera outside shows no one entering his apartment for a day before his death, and the door was boarded up from the inside. Tess isn’t looking forward to trying to chase down an invisible, intangible man, and she has enemies on the force who would love to use this as an excuse to one-up her. But she has bigger problems.

Tess is the daughter of Frank Jacobs, the biggest conman in Brighton, head of an organization of swindlers. Tess didn’t know her father growing up and tracked him down fifteen years ago. She was accepted with open arms but abruptly joined the police force six months later. The reason is only partly down to moral qualms. Tess’s half-sister, Sarah, made a foolish effort to con three men out of their ill-gotten gains and it went badly wrong. Tess ended up killing one of them to bail her and Sarah out. Shaun Mitchell was one of those men, and Tess has good reason to think that someone is trying to tie her half-sister, or even Tess herself, to his murder. So she, with great reluctance, asks Sarah for her help.

Shaun Mitchell isn’t the only locked room mystery our cop and con sisters will have to contend with though. Another man is found stabbed to death in a lift, even though no one was seen to approach him. Another victim is shot to death in a hotel room chained shut and that CCTV shows no one entering. There’s a nice sense of forward momentum to the book. The other members of the book club griped a bit about the writing, but I didn’t mind it too much. There are, perhaps, some chapters that are mostly filler, such as one where Sarah impersonates a psychic, but for the most part I found this to be a solid read on a writing level. The only thing I didn’t like was the book constantly reminding us that Tess killed a man. Yes, it’s important because concealing that and her connection to the Jacobs’ motivates some of Tess’s actions, but I didn’t need reminding of it.

The book falls apart for me at the ending. Take the locked rooms: They aren’t bad. You could argue that the first one makes use of a hackneyed plot device, but I’d say that the way Blackhurst uses it here is silly but plausible. The third locked room is pretty great, my favorite of the book. But there’s almost no cluing. This is especially egregious for the second death. We’re told that X was acting a certain way, but if you flip back, you’ll see that that detail is never mentioned. And it could have been a good clue! And, frankly, the police should have been able to solve it, they would have noticed that fact at some point. It would have been fine if that was the point, like, "they're going to figure this out but I just want to confuse them for a while,) but no, they just don’t notice it. The same goes for the culprit. They’re straight out of a thriller, no chance at figuring out who they are and what they want except through genre savvy and wild guessing. The worst bit is the ending. I can buy Sarah making the choice that she does at the end, I can’t believe that Tess would go through with it.

So, in the end, I was disappointed with Three Card Murder. It’s not an awful book, but it doesn’t live up to the promise of three impossible crimes with a backdrop of con artistry. I can’t in good conscience say you should check it out. Not Recommended.

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel,  Crossexaminingcrime, Beneath the Stains of Time, Fang's Mystery Blog.

A Game of Turnabouts (2019) by Gizmological

In light of just how popular the Ace Attorney series is, it should come as no surprise that there’s plenty of fan content out there. Fan art, fanfiction…and even fan cases. Programs like PyWright and Ace Attorney Online allow dedicated fans to make their own AA cases, ranging from straightforward pastiche to original fiction in the AA engine. One of these dedicated fans is Gizmological. While most well-known AA fan case makers tend to make cases that are either difficult, dark, or dark and difficult, most of Gizmo’s tend to be a little more conventional, including his own AA fan campaign, Beyond the Shadows. A Game of Turnabouts is his most recent fan case.

Set after Spirit of Justice, Game sees Phoenix and Athena invited to the home of millionaire Arkus Strater. Strater is hosting a party, though the guest list is pretty small: Phoenix and Athena, Strater’s business partner Paul Barre, said partner’s wife, Grace (née Gilding) employee Conner Irving, and Strater’s daughter’s boyfriend Ken Forza. Strater announces that they’re going to play a murder mystery game. “No need to be alarmed. Nobody here is going to die.” The guests are all given roles with certain objectives to complete before the end of the night. All harmless-sounding fun, but the guests seem very, very nervous about this. And the game is based off a real unsolved murder from three years ago that took place with this same group of people.

One guess who’s found stabbed to death upstairs at the end of the game.

Unfortunately for Phoenix, he’s the only one upstairs at the time of the murder, and so Athena has to defend him from (literal) rockstar prosecutor Klavier Gavin. (“Don’t worry boss, I won’t lose this case, no matter how dreamy the prosecution is!”) But don’t get hasty, this isn’t a lost gem of an impossible crime. The explanation is obvious and no effort is made to disguise it. The trial doesn’t revolve around, “How was this crime committed?” but instead around, “Who could have used this method?” And the mystery overall is pretty solid. The contradictions are pretty good, though most are pretty easy. The exception is one near the beginning of the trial. This is the third(!) time I’ve played this and it tripped me up twice. But the later ones are better; very subtle and tricky. Gizmological has a real knack for re-using the evidence in unexpected ways, or taking evidence that you think is just to set up the background and making it part of the mystery. There’s a clever and understated twist with the rules for the game that I especially liked.

The characters are all pretty memorable, though I wish we’d seen more of some of them during the investigation portion. I really liked what this case did with the killer. They’re not sympathetic in the Conan or Kindaichi sense, where they’re avenging some lost family member, but just someone stuck in a bad position who lashes out, with fatal consequences. Their portrayal—combined with a final twist about one of the characters—gives the case a somber tone without plunging into full darkness.

All in all, this is similar to Turnabout Idol, in that it’s a fun Ace Attorney pastiche that tries to emulate playing the original games. And it succeeds! It’s a good, solid mystery. And while you will obviously get much more out of it if you’ve played the games, you can even enjoy it without that (since the spoilers for the main games are very light until the post-credits). Recommended. I plan to look at more fan cases in the future.

You can play the case here.

Turnabout Idol (2016) by Mie Takase (translated by thewrightstuff)

Image taken from The Case Files of Ho-Ling

Considering how big the Ace Attorney series is, it might come as a shock to people that there aren’t a lot of tie-in novels. I mean, it’s a surprise to me. You’d think that it would be catnip. I guess that’s what the manga stories are for.

But, as Ho-Ling has noted in some of his posts on the series, the format of the games doesn’t really translate well to “traditional” mystery fiction. Ace Attorney is more about adjusting to new information. Series protagonist Phoenix Wright is no Perry Mason. He often goes into court with no idea about what happened or who’s responsible, and even when he does know the latter, there are always unanswered questions he has to figure out in court. So while the series is fair-play, and while it does foreshadow and clue some of its twists, the nitty-gritty is worked out in real-time. You can argue that the series’ focus on exposing contradictions, getting new testimony, exposing the contradictions that come from that, etc., means that you’re solving the mystery in real-time. But my point is that it’s deceptively tricky to make that formula into a book, or to translate a mystery into that format.

But that didn’t stop author Mie Takase from giving it a shot. Takase has written a handful of horror novels (Ho-Ling reviewed one here), but she’s also done a lot of tie-in novels for other video game franchises, from Persona to Kirby. Turnabout Idol was the first of her two books for the Ace Attorney series.

The book opens with Phoenix, along with his assistants, Apollo Justice and Anthea Cykes, arriving at the Pegasus Town mall to support Phoenix’s adoptive daughter Trucy, a magician. Trucy is sharing the stage with two others: idol singer Melody Cutter, who cuts up fruit with a giant knife during her songs, and Wade Ukulfaskul, a painfully unfunny comedian. After Wade crashes and bombs, Melody takes the stage, but it’s clear that her heart’s not in it, not to mention that she’s missing her knife. Phoenix goes to talk to mall’s owner about another job for Trucy, when he’s interrupted by the news: Wade’s been stabbed to death! And guess whose knife did the deed, and who is now in desperate need of a lawyer. Not that she’s very forthcoming about some very important information…

Takase made a real effort to translate game mechanics into book form. It’s not obvious unless you’ve played them, but there were multiple points where I saw gameplay moments like identifying locations on a map or the “Thought Route” seamlessly transferred into a conventional narrative. The characters feel like Ace Attorney characters too, quirky and memorable with funny dialogue. The case against Melody looks bleak, but Phoenix points out some minor flaws in the witnesses' testimonies that stack up to show that they’re lying. I think that some of the series staples like the witnesses having over-dramatic reactions to their lies being pointed out didn’t carry over well, but that’s a minor point.

But nevermind the fannish stuff, how’s the mystery? That’s pretty good too! You have to keep in mind that this was aimed at a younger audience, but with that caveat in mind, the mystery holds up. I suspect that most readers will figure out who the killer is, and maybe even have a pretty good idea of what they did after the crime, but the fun is seeing Phoenix prove that. The final confrontation has a lot of great back-and-forth as Phoenix almost corners the killer, but they come up with a lie to get out of it, but that creates another mistake that Phoenix can push back on, etc., until he finally catches them in a lie they can’t weasel out of. There’s a minor locked room mystery here, as the crime takes place in a room where one entrance is locked and another is under observation, but it’s a pretty small part of the story with a simple solution.

The main weakness is the motive. Not the motive for the murder—that’s fine. If I told you what it was it would sound stupid, but in context it’s actually kind of sad. No, the weakness is in why the killer frames Melody. We’re even told at the end that it was“Undue resentment due to a misunderstanding.” I think that this motive had an interesting core to it that could have been explored, but this book didn’t do that. But that’s the only flaw.

I must also give a shout-out to the translation by “thewrightstuff.” As long-time fans know, the AA series isn’t just a translation, it’s a localization, where the translators change the names and context to set the work in the country of the translation. And while this translator does provide a copy of the book with the original Japanese names, they also have a very good localization. “Melody Cutter.” That’s inspired.

So yeah, this was great. Turnabout Idol is a fun junior mystery novel. Fans of the series should absolutely check it out, but even someone who’s never played the games would enjoy this. Recommended.

The book can be found here.

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Bad Player's Good Reviews.

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).