Gotcha, yeah. That’s hard. My favorite thing for checking writing style is wandering around the library and opening books to the middle pages, but that’s a lot harder when buying online. Usually online previews (when they exist) are the beginning of the book, and the writer hasn’t always settled into their groove yet.
That’s a really good method!
(Also, Merphy Napier is the booktuber I was thinking of. She reviews a lot of SF, but she also branches out on a regular basis.)
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Yeah, absolutely no way would I look at this and think oh, a suspense book about a serial killer (with graphic details too, according to reviews). Humorous account about someone also having some darker thoughts, maybe, or anything from history to philosophy if it wasn’t for BooooooJUM!! (in that font too…) 
It honestly looks like someone wrote something silly with lipstick on a mirror. Also while The Hunting of the Snark is one of my favorite Lewis Carroll poems, I never would have realized they meant that Boojum without the summary 
I found this book looking through the 江戸川乱歩賞 winners. I’m toying with the idea of reading through the winners over time, but I’m honestly none too sure what criteria they’re using to pick winners. Most of the books I haven’t heard of through any other sources 
I have read one winner though, and I really enjoyed it, but it was a winner back in the 60s so I don’t know if that’s representative 
If I understand correctly, this is an award for unpublished manuscripts, so basically a call from Kodansha for new mystery novels. If the other nominees remain unpublished, we’ll never know how good the competition was, so maybe sometimes it’s just a matter of the better option among mediocre alternatives? Quickly scrolling through the list I only recognized one, and that’s because I impulse bought it at some point having never heard of it before. But then, that means nothing at all. I’m actually surprised when I do recognize a book, and that may probably be because we all use more or less the same sources so we keep coming across the same content.
Even one of the recent award winners (センパーファイ ―常に忠誠を―) was never published so far as I can find. I didn’t dig too deep into why, but it’s not for sale anywhere.
I suppose thinking on it pulling from a pool of submitted transcripts might explain the seeming randomness of the styles. With the other prizes I can kind of see a thread but this one is more or less ‘idk, someone died’ 
I do know the most recent winner has been reviewed well, and a handful I’ve seen elsewhere but it’s just unusual for prize winners to be so low profile, I guess?
It’s published, that’s what the prize is all about after all, getting published in the first place. It just got a title change and now goes as 北緯43度のコールドケース.
source: 江戸川乱歩賞 - Wikipedia
Ha! Another title change. The one I read also had a title change. 事件の核心 became 天使の傷跡.
Hunting of the Snark was the first thing that came to my mind, and I was just coming here to post it. 
“It’s a Snark!” was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words “It’s a Boo—”
Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
That sounded like “-jum!” but the others declare
It was only a breeze that went by.
They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
Though, rereading the poem now, I’m suddely wondering if it also inspired the tale of Captain Bottomfingers as well…
boojum
in British English
(ˈbuːdzəm IPA Pronunciation Guide )
SUSTANTIVO
The Wikipedia article on boojum (superfluidity) is a fun read:
The boojum was named by N. David Mermin of Cornell University in 1976. He was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark . As in the poem, the appearance of a boojum can cause something (in this case, the supercurrent) to "softly and suddenly vanish away ". Other, less whimsical names had already been suggested for the phenomenon, but Mermin was persistent. After an exchange of letters that Mermin describes as both “lengthy and hilarious”,[2] the editors of Physical Review Letters agreed to his terminology.
and
The plural of the term is “boojums”, a word initially disliked by Mermin (who at first used “booja”) but one which is defined unambiguously by Carroll in his poem.
So the writing on the book actually says „I‘m superfluous“ ?
Well then…
In today’s issue of similar covers, we’ll explore bright flowers.
I’ve already featured this cover before:
It’s a murder mystery.
Here’s more similar covers. One is a book about a musical competition, one a fantasy book about a miraculous rice plant, one a book about the life of a botanical researcher and one is a crime novel. Just by the picture (no title or previous knowledge), which do you think is which?
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It’s a crime novel
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It’s general fiction about music
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It’s a fantasy novel about rice
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It’s general fiction about the life of a botanical researcher
Here’s one type of cover that apparently holds no surprises: The Empty Chair!
Apparently an empty chair/seat on the cover will (almost?) always signify a mystery. 
Examples:
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
A doll in the chair also means mystery:
But a table between the chairs dispels the mystery and makes things cozy 
告白 a love story about the chair.
I was thinking about cover redesigns and some particularly odd ones I’ve seen. Not all of these I consider odd, but I wanted a variety of examples.
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Found another lone chair cover for a mystery:
And another mostly black cover like these (same author, also mystery):
Maybe chairs are just popular?
Or maybe this book also contains a mystery
What is this book? Not a mystery? Oh no, my theory collapses! 