Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > The Decagon House Murders

If you are a fan of the formal puzzle mysteries of the old school, in particular the Characters On An Island Picked Off One By One subgenre, this is one of the absolute best.

This is the third Japanese "Honkaku" mystery I've been able to read this year, all released newly in the US in translation by Pushkin Vertigo. (The other two are by Seishi Yokomizo.) This one is my favorite of the genre so far, hitting all the beats you want, while balancing surprises with the tropes. It feels distinctly different and more modern than the mid-century ones, but still with a dedication to the form that goes beyond homage. (This title is from the mid-80's.)

At first I was skeptical. Yes fine all of our characters are in a Detective Fiction club and have taken on the names of their favorite authors as their nicknames, but they seemed to run together too much. I had only the most basic feel for who they were as the story started and I worried they would blend together. But I went with it and found that I knew all of them well enough to rank them as suspects, which is really all you need.

What is trickiest about this genre is the puzzle nature of it. Personally I don't love it when the reveal of the killer is one that was impossible for the reader to imagine on their own, though this is quite common because the setups are so intricate they're designed to be too wild to unravel. On the other hand, if it's too obvious what is really going on, you lose interest. This book balanced it just right for me. I had a hunch who the killer was but the book made me keep wondering if I was right and keep weighing other possible options. It turned out I was right about the killer (hooray!) and I'm fine being right as long as I'm constantly guessing, it's actually my best possible outcome. There were also still plenty of reveals I didn't foresee, and yet none of them felt so farfetched that I rolled my eyes at the book.

One thing I liked particularly about the book was the use of double plot. We have our characters trapped on an island getting picked off, but we also have a second set of characters on the mainland investigating another mystery. The second mystery is an older one but also set on the island and we know that it involves our characters, so we get to suspend the tension of the island's action while fleshing out the question of why this is all happening and how we got here. The way they're combined in the end is particularly brilliant.

As I usually do with Japanese fiction in translation, I'll note that if you're new to it you may find the prose stilted at first, give yourself some time to get comfortable.