This book was so good! I thought I knew the twist and of course, I did not. I really couldn't put it down. I want to read more by this author now

A good puzzle mystery in the classic style leaves you simultaneously flummoxed and saying “of course!” You come out of the best reveals with a sense that the solution was inevitable...but also you didn’t quite get there. The Decagon House Murders absolutely nailed this dynamic for me.

I’m a big fan of classic detective novels, much like the college students at the heart of this story (though I would never accept a vacation to a murder island like they did, because, I mean, have they read these books??). I’ve read every Agatha Christie several times, especially And Then There Were None, one of her most iconic for a reason. I was sure I could figure this one out, and sure that I had. And I was almost entirely wrong (that “almost” is doing a lot of work here - the reader has to get SOME of the clues along the way and feel a bit smug about themselves, after all). There’s a line near the end, which starts the revelation process, that absolutely slammed into me and had me flipping back pages, wanting to instantly reread the entire book and see the clues I’d missed. Now that I knew whodunnit, I wanted to see howdunnit. (It’s a short book, an immediate reread isn’t out of the question.)

It’s a delicious, fiendish puzzle, masterfully rendered, and the direct ties to its precursor and to the genre in which it plays so successfully are both lightly metafictional fun, setting up what’s about to happen for instance, and directly tied into the story, as the mystery novel fans who find themselves in the midst of a mystery themselves use their knowledge of the genre to hunt for clues. I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of different detective types - Morisu’s armchair detective compared to Shimada’s more active, energetic and enigmatic type, while Ellery cuts a Holmesian figure on the island. The prose feels a bit clunky at times, but I can’t really judge how much is the translation and how much the original. And while I’ve noticed some readers complaining that the characters are weakly developed, basically just archetypes, that seems to me to rather miss the point of the genre and this particular incarnation of it. There’s a touch of whimsy to the whole book, grisly as it is, that delighted this whodunnit fan.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Vertigo for the advance review copy!