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十角館の殺人 Home Thread
Week 12
Start Date: Jul 25
Previous Part: Week 11
Reading:
| Week |
Start Date |
Chapter |
Page Count |
| Week 12 |
Jul 25 |
Chapter 12 + Epilogue |
~56 |
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Well, that was fine.
When I started the book, I assumed the students would get killed in ways that were inspired by the authors they’re nicknamed after. That’s the whole point of referencing them, right? But actually they didn’t matter; Van could have a nickname for any random reason and it would work just as well.
The characters themselves are supposed to be mystery fans but most of them didn’t act like it. They just politely stayed in their rooms all night so the murderer could move around freely. This is especially noticeable after 46番目の密室 where the characters were aware of locked room murders, suggested possible solutions, etc.
The Decagon House was also pretty irrelevant. Surely there will be some neat geometry trick, like rooms that aren’t actually the same size or angles that aren’t quite right? Nope, the building just has a secret basement.
The victim x / detective / murderer plates also didn’t amount to much.
The book wasn’t bad, and apparently it was really influential, but it’s hard not to be distracted by all the unfulfilled potential.
The ending didn’t work for me.
There was 0 motive given throughout the book because their relationship was simply kept hidden from everyone. Therefore, It was basically impossible to guess the correct culprit. It feels shallow somehow.
Instead of having the classical setup where the detective explains to you what happened, slowly peeling back the truth, we got the information dumb of van daydreaming. It didn’t feel gripping and after his reveal I put together most of what happened from the story, so 80% of it felt like retreading known story beats. Some of it also felt like a looot of luck on his part, even though everything was decently explained. Except for being found out coming back to the island the last time, everything went according to his plan. Even though half of the ways he would murder them he didn’t think of before. As for example the 11 sided cup incident or him cutting of the hands show…
Additionally, I didn’t like his assertion that he did the killing reluctantly. Like what the hell, you murder 6 people in cold blood but sure you had strong reservations against it…
I would have liked to know if the ring he saw with olcy was actually the ring he gave chiori or not. For me, he exaggerated everything, so my head cannon is that the ring was actually unrelated, and it was just one more excuse to hate on the people.
I am with him in feeling frustration in that they didn’t take her death as seriously as they should have. But honestly mistakes do happen, and I don’t think that any of them intended to actually harm her.
On top of that I don’t like that he could get away with everything he did. Only because he put his confession letter in the bottle and stumbled upon it at the beach, which he took as a sign, he kinda gave himself up in the end. At least that’s how I read it.
It wasn’t bad. Just hearing about it so often, and how great a book it is, let me expect a little more tension. Or at least a better chance at guessing what is going on. I think the other 2 mystery books I read so far (硝子の塔の殺人 and 後鳥羽伝説殺人) worked better for me than this one.
Probably a solid 3/5 for me. I think the writing being actually decent did a lot of work for this novel. The characters weren’t that great except for the 本土 people that were mainly pointless, and the story was just okay.
