The Decagon House Murders

Books | Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General

3.7

(121)

Yukito Ayatsuji

Students from a university mystery club decide to visit an island which was the site of a grisly multiple murder the year before. Predictably, they get picked off one by one by an unseen murderer. Is there a madman on the loose? What connection is there to the earlier murders? The answer is a bombshell revelation which few readers will see coming.The Decagon House Murders is a milestone in the history of detective fiction. Published in 1987, it is credited with launching the shinhonkaku movement which restored Golden Age style plotting and fair-play clues to the Japanese mystery scene, which had been dominated by the social school of mystery for several decades. It is also said to have influenced the development of the wildly popular anime movement.This, the first English edition, contains a lengthy introduction by the maestro of Japanese mystery fiction, Soji Shimada.Locked Room International discovers and publishes impossible crime masterpieces from all over the world

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Author

Yukito Ayatsuji

Pages

228

Publisher

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Published Date

2015

ISBN

1508503737 9781508503736

Community ReviewsSee all

"My love for closed room mysteries led me to this brilliant book 📚. Quite an assessment given that I am only a few chapters in. This classic mystery is translated from Japanese and is one of the first in a category of mysteries from a group named the Honkaku mystery writers club. Given that I love mysteries and that all of this is new to me, I am reading this one. Join me! Or if you have read any of these fill me in and teach me more about them. 😄😄😄"

Juliet Shalu Castillo Livesay

"Too good! Could not put it down! "

Ana Trejo

"It's a good mystery novel if you can get over the horrible way the only two female characters are depicted. Even though I hated all the "she replied hysterically", I did enjoy the story. "

Nadia

"5/5 stars. one of my new favorite books"

Jack

"10/10! I had a hard time keeping their Japanese names and English names together. I would recommend writing their names down on a bookmark"

Payton dietz

"(3.5 stars, rounded up) I had trouble getting into this one at first, it felt like not much was happening related to the murders. The “mainland” chapters also felt like nothing was going on in them, and it was weird how they just stopped appearing suddenly. About halfway, the story then suddenly picked up and it got very suspenseful and shocking, the ending was also unpredictable (but I might have gotten the identity of the murderer wrong because of the confusing Japanese names and nicknames lol.) I can definitely see the “And Then There Were None” influence, there was a similar idea with multiple people dying one at a time in a secluded setting, but this had its own storyline too. If you can handle waiting for things to happen, I recommend this for a unique, niche murder mystery."