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gjamesmoses 's review for:
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
by Sōji Shimada
A deranged artist plans to slaughter his children, dismember their bodies, and resemble them to create the supreme being Azuth. Before he can do this, he is murdered in a locked room ... but his children are killed anyway. Now, 40 years later, private detective (maybe?) Kiyoshi Mitarai is on the case.
Man, what a great premise. The locked room murder is a dud (I challenge anyone to attempt to replicate the method the book gives for locking a door from the outside; it simply wouldn't work), but the main focus of the novel is the Azuth murders, and the solution to that works better (and is much more straightforward than the book description wants you to believe; I identified the murderer before it was revealed, which I very rarely can do).
The detective is ... functional. One of dozens of generically "eccentric" private detectives that populate the genre. I do wish the victims of the Azuth murders had been characterized literally at all. It's all very well for the Afterwards to claim that honkaku novels are "focused on plotting and clues" instead of psychology, but I can't remember the last time I read a mystery that cared so little about its murder victims. I don't require a huge amount of pathos, but I think a novel about a serial killer that never describes the victims, or shows anyone who cares about the victims, or asks the readers to care about the victims, is kind of tacky.
Man, what a great premise. The locked room murder is a dud (I challenge anyone to attempt to replicate the method the book gives for locking a door from the outside; it simply wouldn't work), but the main focus of the novel is the Azuth murders, and the solution to that works better (and is much more straightforward than the book description wants you to believe; I identified the murderer before it was revealed, which I very rarely can do).
The detective is ... functional. One of dozens of generically "eccentric" private detectives that populate the genre. I do wish the victims of the Azuth murders had been characterized literally at all. It's all very well for the Afterwards to claim that honkaku novels are "focused on plotting and clues" instead of psychology, but I can't remember the last time I read a mystery that cared so little about its murder victims. I don't require a huge amount of pathos, but I think a novel about a serial killer that never describes the victims, or shows anyone who cares about the victims, or asks the readers to care about the victims, is kind of tacky.