Alright, had another book I wanted to finish reading by a deadline so brushed this off to focus that down, and then busted my way back in here. (I know week 6 is up but it’s technically still Friday so I’m considering it caught up.) Author is obviously a huge mystery buff (hopefully they’re just as good as writing them). The 屍人荘 reference was very cute.
My main thoughts were basically exactly covered by this post. Why do we need to know exactly how many rotations up and down the stairway they go each time. If you look at the diagram it looks like the rooms go up the cone in a spiral—so there could easily be a second set of rooms opposite (forming a double spiral), although doesn’t seem like that would help much at this point. Fire could’ve been started by a lensing effect (Kozushima seems like a jerk enough to make windows like that, and the fact that nobody is suggesting the possibilities just makes it seem more likely).
Yeesh, Yuma is an awful murderer. Pretty shocked nobody noticed he was gone. Really hope that the at the end Tsukiyo is like “yeah I clocked you immediately, figured you were so obvious with that one I could kill anyone else I wanted and nobody would believe it wasn’t you” (also why she didn’t want to tell the group about their “alibis”)
This is going back a bit, but regarding the “Y” message being lame—100%, but only because if you’re going to be choosing famous poisoning murder mysteries to reference, The Tragedy of X is tied much more strongly to poisoning than Y.
Regarding the bloody message at Oita’s crime scene, my best guess is that Oita wrote the killer’s name (or something else incriminating) and then the killer wrote over the message to disguise it, but too lazy to puzzle out which character’s name could undergird the final message.