Picture Perfect

John Baird caught sight of a book and it captured his attention. On the cover was an old photograph of a street from a bygone era, but for some reason, the photograph haunted him. Desperate for answers, John even allowed himself to be hypnotized by a local shop owner to try and get to the bottom of the mystery. His obsession with the photograph begins to distress his new wife Andrea, who is equally puzzled by her husband’s reticence to discuss his London job – he disappears for the day and says nothing about where he was or what he did...

Meanwhile, Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst are hunting a serial killer known as the Acid Bath Murderer, and before long the two plot threads collide, along with a third thread taking place in Victorian London. There are even two impossibilities at work: first, a clairvoyant sends his own death prediction to himself, only to be found murdered in a locked room. Second, a man disappears without trace from a room that is under observation from all sides.

Enter the Murderer

Set in the world of the theatre, Derek Smith’s Come to Paddington Fair brings back Algy Lawrence as well as his policeman sidekick, Chief Inspector Steve Castle, from Whistle up the Devil. Their involvement in the story begins innocuously enough, as Castle has received a pair of tickets to the theatre. But included with the tickets was a mysterious message that simply reads: “Come to Paddington Fair.” The meaning of the message is not immediately apparent, but its sinister undertones become quite clear when the play’s leading lady is killed onstage, during a climactic scene in which her character was shot.

Fortunately, with two detectives in the audience, the investigation is poised to begin on the right foot, and indeed, a suspect is apprehended almost immediately! But, as the investigation proceeds, suspect after suspect is cleared, and it slowly begins to appear impossible for anyone to have committed the crime! Thus, Come to Paddington Fair establishes itself firmly as a sort of spiritual sequel to Whistle up the Devil. Instead of a conventional locked room mystery, Smith gives his readers an impossible crime in the vein of “nobody could have committed the murder… and yet it happened!”

Treasure Island

Introduction: Goodness me, it has been a very long time since I last reviewed a book, not since late August of 2015!! Unfortunately, the demands on my time during the school year have made reading fiction nearly impossible. Indeed, during the 2016-17 academic year, as I ended up writing over 160 pages worth of essays, I was only able to read one work of fiction – Shusaku Endo’s Silence – but it was a book I felt I should not review on the blog. Now that summer is upon us, I can take a deep breath, step back from academia, and read a little bit more fiction. So I decided to treat myself with some mysteries. My reviewing may be a little rusty, so I please ask you to forgive me in advance.

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As Alice Arisugawa’s The Moai Island Puzzle begins, we are introduced to a group of students at Kyoto University who are on their way to Kashikijima Island in order to solve a puzzle leading to hidden treasure. One of these students is the author, Alice Arisugawa, who along with his friend Mr. Egami is heading to the island on the invitation of their friend Maria. (Alice, by the way, is a male name here.) Maria’s grandfather, Tetsunosuke Arima, hid a collection of diamonds somewhere on the island, but neglected to tell anyone the location of the treasure before dying. All that is known is that the moai statues all over the island, inspired by the Easter Island statues, are the key to solving the puzzle.

It doesn’t take long for the murders to begin, as two bodies are discovered. The victims were shot, but the rifle used is nowhere in the room, and all potential exits (the window and the only door) were locked. More mysterious events occur, and it is up to Mr. Egami to solve the puzzle, with Alice acting as his Watson.

The Geometry of Murder

A group of people is stuck on an island, with no way off. Stuck on the island with them is a mad, cunning killer, determined to pick off the group members one by one. It’s a race against time, a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. No, I’m not talking about Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Rather, I’m talking about a recently-published translation of a Japanese detective story: The Decagon House Murders.

The titular Decagon House is, of course, shaped like a decagon, and the island upon which it sits was recently the site of a gruesome series of murders. Naturally, a university’s mystery club (modelled on such a club at Kyoto University) decides the island is a great place for a club excursion. Thus the members meet up, each of them known by a pseudonym taken from one of the great Western Golden Age writers: Agatha, Orczy, Van Dine, Leroux, Ellery, Carr, and Poe. It doesn’t take long for murder to occur, and as the body count rises, the list of suspects gets shorter and shorter…