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. But from another perspective, the parallel between this novel and Agatha Christie’s seminal work And Then There Were None is also made plainly obvious. As the amateur sleuths on the island try to figure out which one amongst them is the murderer, and those on the mainland begin to unravel the grizzly past of the Nakamura’s, the reader is left both clued up and mystified.

stars after I re-read the story for the third or fourth time, it's a nice take of the traditional murder mystery taking place within an "isolated mansion" (the students went to a remote island and were killed one by one, obviously this book is a homage to And Then There Were None).

At first, they assume that 1 of them is the killer but there’s also the possibility that Seji might be still alive.

Seven friends go to a deserted island where a bloody triple murder-suicide was committed just six months before in this Japanese classic locked room mystery that gives a nod to And Then There Were None. Still, none of the murders actually requires an elaborate setup; any of the seven could’ve done them.I don’t know if this is because of the clever conclusion or if there was something majorly lost in translation, but I don’t quite get why this would be one of the standouts.

The group, who go by names drawn from Western murder mystery greats such as ‘Ellery’, ‘Carr’ and ‘Agatha’, spend much of the first night exploring the ruins of a burned-down mansion that was the sight of the murders. Perhaps there was some elegancy that was lost in translation, but I found the character interactions to feel stilted and unnatural. The Witch Hunt Game: a breathtaking thriller sets in a scary private school for girls which looks like it's taken straight out of Dario Argento's surreal horror movie classic Suspiria. At times, Ayatsuji could be accused of under-developing the personalities of the affectatious group of students.In the Decagonal hall, they postulate on various theories, and generally get excited for a week of hypotheticals. The Decagon House Murders ( Japanese: 十角館の殺人, Hepburn: Jukkakukan no Satsujin) is a Japanese manga series, based on Yukito Ayatsuji's novel of the same name, illustrated by Hiro Kiyohara. Unlike, for example, Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table, where her detectives are series characters so you know you can take them at their word, the detectives here are all unknown to me.