The Honjin Murders (本陣殺人事件)

⚖The case for it

Yokomizo writes a locked room and tells you that is what he is doing, name-checking Leroux and Carr while the narrator addresses you directly, which readers call a “locked room mystery that didn’t even pretend to be anything else.” The images do a lot of work: a koto heard in the night, a sword standing in the snow, a snowbound estate where family lineage outranks money. Kindaichi is scruffy and unassuming and notices the thing nobody else did. Under two hundred pages with nothing padded. “Wicked and clever.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The explanation is “too elaborate to pull off,” and readers reach for words like theatrical and “eye-rollingly wacky and bizarre” once it is finally laid out. The final chapters cram in clues and reversals at a rate that turns the close into a pileup. The cast is flat and interchangeable, there to service the machine. The narration is “heavy on the telling,” summarising for long stretches before anything is dramatised. And enough is withheld until so late that solving it alongside the detective was never really available.

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings