Description
One of The Guardian‘s “Top 10 Locked Room Mysteries”
An amateur detective races against the clock to solve a decades-old murder mystery in this “bloody and bizarre” crime novel with a twist hailed as “one of the most original”-an unmissable triumph of Japanese literature (Daily Mail).
Astrologer, fortune teller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must solve a macabre murder mystery that has baffled Japan for 40 years-in just one week.
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With the help of his freelance illustrator friend, Kiyoshi sets out to answer the questions that have haunted the country ever since: Who murdered the artist Umezawa, raped and killed his daughter, and then chopped up the bodies of six others to create Azoth, ‘the perfect woman’?
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With maps, charts, and other illustrations, this story of magic and illusion-pieced together like a great stage tragedy-challenges the reader to unravel the mystery before the final curtain falls.
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This quintessential Japanese “logic mystery”-eerie, gory, and intriguing-combines the puzzle-solving of Golden Age Western detective fiction with elements of shocking horror and dark humor.
