Week 5: 46番目の密室

Join the Murder Mystery Series Meta Book Club here!

46番目の密室 Home Thread

Week 5

Start Date: Jan 31
Previous Part: Week 4
Next Part: Week 6

Reading:

Week Start Date Chapter Start Page Page Count
Week 5 Jan 31 Chapter 6 217 69

Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • When asking for help, please mention the chapter and page number. Also mention what version of the book you are reading.
  • Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun! :durtle:

Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll.
(Please feel free to update your status whenever you like!)

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I am no longer reading the book
0 voters
2 Likes

Finished this week’s reading!

I’m usually able to get these done in one shot but this week somehow dragged more for me and I took 3 days to finish it. The words in the chimney are interesting but mean nothing to me, and I don’t yet see the significance of the oil can that was moved. I’m not really seeing the logical puzzle fitting together quite yet and am still tossing about motives in my head instead. As a result Kouji and Sachiko seem the most likely to me, as the people most apt to have some kind of relationship with our mysterious dead man.

3 Likes

It’s very suspicious to me that every mystery novel I read has a character named 鵜飼 :detective:

2 Likes

So we got the big ol’ investigation out of the way, and a few mysterious points but no silver bullet. The words in the fireplace are bizarre, but it seems like something Makabe would’ve had to put in himself, right?

We’re getting very little info on the physicality of the basement, which makes locked room theorizing kinda tricky. We finally found the fishing line, which makes the study locked room possible, but wayyyyy too much was used. So it needed to connect two far away places (the neighbor’s house is basically the only one we’ve gotten any info), or wrapped around a shorter distance a bunch of times, but neither use is clear.

The gas cans are a bit interesting… it could just be convenience, like the killer was near the garage and took a can from there, and then later since they were in the house they took it from the storage closet. But this whole thing seems planned (they lured the victim to the house beforehand, set up the gifts (which we still aren’t getting anything extra on), etc.) so you’d think they’d have known about the need for the gas cans. So another possibility that occurred to me was two killers–Makabe could’ve killed the old guy, and then someone else killed Makabe. The second killer torched Makabe to make it look like both crimes were by the same person but grabbed the gas can from a different location.

I wonder if the scene where Alice almost fell off the roof will end up having any plot significant later on, or if it was just to make the roof investigation a little less boring.

2 Likes