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…
