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!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it was very fast paced and kept me guessing throughout, loved how Agatha Christie it felt too right down to the nod to and then there were none right at the start all the way to even the characters names.

4/5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley and Pushkin Press for providing this e-arc!

What a fun thriller! I still don't know what a standard for the genre would be like but there were about 10-12 characters that we meet here and that hindered me from rating this higher. The twist was great and I also didn't expect this to be by the same person who did Another so that was a fun surprise! It kept me guessing and I suppose the use of Western names helped me a bit with familiarizing myself with the content.

I was kindly provided a digital ARC of this book by Pushkin Press via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Decagon House Murders is a classic Japanese mystery that will keep you guessing until the last page.

What would you do if you were trapped with your friends on a desolate island when suddenly one of them dies?

That’s precisely what happens to the members of a university mystery club that decide to visit an island where a gruesome crime was committed the year before. Is the killer between them? Is there a madman on the loose? Is there any connection with the prior crime? Will you be able to guess who did it?

I can’t say I didn’t suspect the murderer at least once. But the author does a masterful job in making you second-guess your deductions. So as the book progressed, they stopped being one of my suspects. Therefore, in the end, none of my three prime suspects ended being the murderer. So that’s points in favor.

Another thing I enjoyed was that the author gives you all the clues and the whole picture. So it’s actually possible to solve the mystery before the final revelation. That makes it more engaging as not much is hidden from you, so you’re basically trying to solve the mystery along with the characters.

My main issues with this one were the characters and the dialogue. This is a mystery, so I was expecting a plot-heavy book. Still, I feel like you don’t really get a chance to connect with all the characters and be worried or even to root for them. Also, a lot of the time, the dialogue felt unnatural to the point it sometimes became distracting.

And this may be just me, but the repeated mention of cigarettes got so monotonous and annoying I had to stop every time and take a deep breath.

All in all, if you’re looking for a quick and exciting mystery, then you should definitely give this one a go!

Final review: 3/5.

Publication day: May 25th, 2021. It’s already available for preorder!

This book is a very clear homage to Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None' in plot. The author doesn't shy away from this though, with the characters at first cracking jokes about how 7 people staying a week on a remote island with no outside communication or way off is similar to her setup of whodunnit. The 7 college students are all part of their University's mystery club and the island was the site of a tragic murder-suicide 6 months ago. But what if the similarity to Christie’s book isn’t a joke?

This is a translation from Japanese, but I wouldn't have known just from reading it. It's tough for anyone to go up against one of the most well known and well loved mystery writers of all time, especially when you bring it on yourself by referencing one of her most well known works. But the author did a good job putting his own spin on the topic which kept it fresh and different. The only criticism I have is the slight flatness of the characters and setting, at least compared to Christie's. One thing I love about her books is even if you remove any descriptors to locations, it’s still so clearly British through descriptions of settings and characters. It really helps the characters come alive. The way this book is written, it could have taken place most anywhere in the developed world. So I would have liked to see a little more of that.

Otherwise the book was a well done example of a classic whodunit that I really enjoyed reading. I read it all in one day because I just needed to know who did it and why!

I thoroughly enjoyed this Japanese "locked room" mystery. An homage to one of my favorite books, And Then There Were None, it managed to have a shocking, yet "fair play" solution that made me want to go back and reread parts to see how it was done. My only complaints are that the characters were flat and the last 18 percent was almost purely exposition.

So glad I finally read this, as I’ve heard about it for years. Recommended And Then There Were None and this as a dual read to my book club; big hit!

Solid, clean, cleaver, inventive and fun! Plus a nice trip to Japan if one is eager for a cross cultural exchange for genre literature and a bit of architecture too :)

Thank you to Netgalley for the read! I’m pretty much on the Japanese murder/thriller bandwagon now; which is so great and gets me outside my #lockdown.

The premise of the book is very interesting, but I had a hard time getting into the way it was written. None of the characters felt like the main character. None of the characters had enough feeling for me to connect with them.

I recieved an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

6 students that are part of a mystery club at their university decide to spend a week living in the deserted ruins on a small island, where a year earlier 4 people were murdered. Unfortunately, the students are slowly being murdered, one by one, and the murders seem to have an eerie connection to those that occurred the previous year. Who is behind the deaths, and why? Another member of the mystery club, who did not join the group on the island, has started to look into the earlier murders after receiving a cryptic letter. Will he find a connection?

I read Agatha Christie's classic tale And Then There Were None about a year ago, and thoroughly enjoyed this original "locked door mystery." When I saw this Japanese translation with a similar theme, I was excited to read it. I enjoyed the read, but overall it fell a tiny bit flat. I had some difficulty keeping the characters straight as there wasn't too much character development, and never felt 100% invested in the storyline. I haven't read many books that were translated from their original language, and wonder how much of the original charm was lost in that translation. I think the more modern takes on the "locked door mystery" have more appeal, as they tend to have a bit more background and character development. That being said, I still found myself surprised by the ending and wondering if I could have figured it out sooner.

4,75/5 stars
I LOVED this book. The pacing is so good and i loved all the characters! Everything was so well done, i did not suspect a thing. I will definitely read more books by this author!

A fun whodunnit, set on a secluded island filled with secrets. I enjoyed the use of nicknames of famous authors for the characters and the twists. I initially had my suspicions of who the murderer was, but the reveal in the end was unexpected.

Many thanks to the publisher and author for the ARC. I enjoyed the book!

This Japanese murder mystery was originally published in 1987 and is now available from Pushkin Vertigo in a new English translation by Ho-Ling Wong. Having recently read two other reissued Japanese classic mysteries, The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo and Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada, I jumped at the chance to read this one, especially when I saw comparisons with one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels, And Then There Were None.

After a brief prologue, the book begins with seven students, all members of their university Mystery Club, arriving on the lonely island of Tsunojima, where they are planning to spend the week. It’s the perfect location for a group of crime lovers because a series of unsolved murders took place there the year before, so the students are looking forward to exploring the island and using their skills as amateur detectives to investigate the mystery. Soon after their arrival, however, they discover that someone is planning to murder them one by one – but is the killer one of the seven or is someone else hiding on the island?

This is an interesting novel and a quick one to read; although it takes a while to get started, the pace rapidly picks up once the first murder takes place. The action switches between the island and the mainland, where Kawaminami, an ex-member of the Mystery Club, is carrying out some investigations of his own, having received a letter which leads him to question what really happened on Tsunojima Island the year before. The alternating narratives add some tension to the story as we wait to see whether Kawaminami will solve the mystery before everyone on the island is dead.

The similarities with And Then There Were None were obvious as soon as I started to read, but sadly this book doesn’t come close to the brilliance of the Christie novel – and the eventual solution and motive are quite different anyway. However, it’s clear that Yukito Ayatsuji must have been an admirer of Golden Age crime novels and he pays homage to them in various ways all the way through the book. The seven members of the Mystery Club have all taken the names of classic crime writers and are known as Ellery, Agatha, Leroux, Carr, Van Dine, Poe and Orczy, while Kawaminami’s nickname is Conan – or sometimes Doyle!

The characters themselves, though, never really come to life at all and feel interchangeable, with very little to differentiate one from another. This leads to a lack of emotional involvement and I found that I didn’t really care who was murdered or who the culprit was. I felt completely detached from what was happening and although I could appreciate the cleverness of the plot, it wasn’t a story that I could become fully absorbed in. To be fair, this seems to be typical of Japanese mystery novels in general, particularly the subgenre known as honkaku, of which this book is said to be a classic example. Honkaku books have been described as traditional plot-driven ‘puzzle mysteries’ with complex solutions and appear to be less concerned with character development.

Still, I found things to enjoy in this novel. The revelations at the end took me completely by surprise and, if I hadn’t had so many other books waiting to be read, I would have been tempted to go back and re-read at least the first few chapters to see how I could have missed the clues. And I loved the descriptions of the Decagon House, the building in which the students stay during their time on the island – a decagonal building with decagonal rooms, decagonal tables and even decagonal cups!

I had been looking for mysteries to read that would evoke Agatha Christie. I had a few false starts. This one was very much patterned after And Then There Were None. Unlike some other "chalet in the snowstorm" type books I have read in the past year, this one had an intriguing mystery and made me care about several of the characters.

What makes The Decagon House Murders special is that the author wants you to try and solve the mystery. It's a pet peeve of mine whenever it feels like an author is trying to hide information to guarantee a surprising ending, but the Decagon's climax can both be predicted yet was still shocking.

The only issue when trying to write a really plot-focused story is it does lose sight of the characters. I initially was expecting a fun spin on the And Then There Were None concept with characters from a detective literature club, yet none (with the exception of the murderer and the main "detective") stand out from memory.

I'm glad this is getting an English translation because it's been on my radar for a while, and now I have a new locked room mystery variation to recommend! Thanks Netgalley and Pushkin Press.

I’ve been hearing about this book for ages and was SO happy to finally see an english translation. This has been a cult classic in Japan for a long time and it’s easy to see why after finishing it.

If you love classic mysteries—especially of the locked room and puzzle variety—you’ll love this one.
From the creepy, isolated, and disorienting setting to the multi-layered mystery, this hits all the right notes.

It’s a fun one to try to figure out on your own, and it works off the And Then There Were None model, so if you love a mystery where members of a group get picked off one by and one and it seems as though the killer is one of them as well, you’re in luck.

The story is well constructed (no plot holes or frustrating info dump at the end) and though it’s not as difficult as I might have liked to guess the killer correctly early in the book, the Why doesn’t come so easily. There’s also a fun twist at the end that will probably surprise you even if you had the killer identified before then.

I hope this is a sign of things to come and that we’ll see more mystery thrillers translated from Japan translated for English language readers.

What a ride! I absolutely devoured this book. Such a thrilling investigation.

The Decagon House Murders was a hommage to the murder mystery genre, and if I did think at first that I knew what to expect I was so very wrong. If the beginning resembled Agatha Christie's And then they were none, that impression quickly faded as we advanced through the plot. Yukito Ayatsuji created characters that were very unique and a plot that kept surprising me. I got attached to all of them, and as I understood which direction the story was taking it did make me feel stressed for them. The writing style was beautiful and fluide. Being the first book translated from Japanese that I read, it was refreshing to see a new writing style.

One would think that a group of mystery novel enthusiasts would know better not to take up a strange invitation to an island that has a bad reputation. One of them even references And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie on the boat ride over. But then, most of the characters in the excellent The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji (translated by Ho-Ling Wong) are college students who think that they’re clever enough to outwit any dangers. It isn’t long before the characters of this novel start to die off in spite of all their supposed brilliance, even as they try to figure out who’s behind an astounding number of murders.

The misdirection begins immediately in The Decagon House Murders. We’re in Japan, near the island of Kyushu, but details about the exact location are obscured. Also, everyone we meet in the first chapter is known by the name of a Golden Age mystery writer. There’s (John Dickson) Carr, Agatha (Christie), (Gaston) Leroux, and more. They’re all members of a Mystery Club at their unnamed university. In addition to devouring mysteries, they also write stories for their own mystery magazine. The idea behind their trip is to use the atmosphere of Tsunojima island—the site of a mass murder/suicide—to inspire them for their new issue, as well as put their minds to the still not-quite-solved mystery of what happened. Things seem all right for the first day, but they don’t stay that way. Within 48 hours, the first victim dies.

While one clump of protagonists runs around the strange decagonal house of the title trying to figure things out and not get murdered, an ex-member of the Mystery Club receives a letter accusing him and the rest of the Club of killing yet another member of the Mystery Club the previous year. (The members of the club now on the island encouraged the deceased girl to drink so much that she died of alcohol poisoning.) The ex-member—mostly known as Conan even though he doesn’t like it—follows a thin trail of clues to the father of the deceased girl. Conan knows something is seriously wrong on Tsunojima. Worse, he as no way of contacting his friends and doesn’t have enough information to go to the police.

The two plots run in tandem, throwing up red herrings and genuine clues alike. It’s not until near the end that I was able to confirm my suspicions about what was going. Ayatsuji follows the rules of fair play, but this is still one of the most devious mysteries I’ve ever read. The Decagon House is a brilliant story in the style of Golden Age mysteries. It definitely lives up to the hype.

The Decagon House murders is a “Japanese Cult Classic Mystery” published in the 1980s.

This English translation is coming out on May 25th of this year in the US. Thank you to the publisher Steerforth Press, Pushkin Vertigo and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was intrigued by the plot synopsis. It involves a crime fiction club from a Japanese university whose members decide to visit a deserted island that was recently the cite of gruesome murders. This of course reminded me of And Then There Were None, the masterpiece by Agatha Christie.

The nods to classic mysteries continue throughout the book. Each of the characters on the island has the nickname of a famous mystery writer, and their discussion of crime often alludes to common tropes or techniques popular in golden age mysteries.

I was totally engrossed in this page turner. The chapters alternate between the action on the island and the actions of other characters who are investigating the previous murders. This structure really worked to build the backstory and still keep my attention. Just like in And Then There Were None, the reader is trying to solve the mystery as multiple clues, discussions, and misdirections mystify. Yet the story’s similarities to And Then There Were None almost make the mystery more difficult to solve because I wanted to fit it into paths I remembered from that book.

At one point, my jaw absolutely dropped! I found the way all the clues are tied together very satisfying. I love a mystery that keeps me wondering and guessing to the end. I think classic mystery fans like me will love this book.

In the style of Agatha Christie, this mystery artfully weaves the reader into its tale. I'm not going to say I didn't figure it out, as an avid mystery reader, and this book being nearly as old as I am. The translation is absolutely lovely. It creates a decent puzzle for most readers, if this was pushed at people that didn't read a ton of mystery novels, they would likely have their mind blown.