• Author: Yukito Ayatsuji
• Series: Standalone
• Genre: Murder Mystery
• No. of pages: 224
• Dates read: 29.04.2021 – 02.05.2021
• Star Rating: 2 stars
• ARC: Pushkin Vertigo

Plot: The members of a university mystery club decide to visit an island which was the site of a grisly, unsolved multiple murder the year before. They’re looking forward to investigating the crime, putting their passion for solving mysteries to practical use, but before long there is a fresh murder, and soon the club-members realise they are being picked off one-by-one. The remaining amateur sleuths will have to use all of their murder-mystery expertise to find the killer before they end up dead too.

So, first of all I would like to thank Pushkin Vertigo and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I haven’t seen too much discussion surrounding this book so I went into it very blind. I have been enjoying Pushkin Vertigo’s translated murder mysteries recently though.

So, to start off I want to say that I felt the plot itself was enjoyable but I wasn’t a fan of the writing style so it hindered my enjoyment of the novel as a whole. The writing itself just didn’t really flow for me and at times I found the dialogue to be clunky. I think mainly it just wasn’t that engaging. I didn’t really connect to the story.

The plot, like I mentioned, was enjoyable. I enjoyed watching the mystery unfold and trying to guess who it was. Especially as the characters started dwindling, my theories would get thrown out of the window. I also enjoyed how the plot was split into two pathways. One, which follows the the students on the island and one, which followed a student on the mainland who had left the club the year before. I felt that the switching between the two pathways meant that the pacing worked really well and left you wanting to read more and uncover more.

The characters in this book were sort of varied. The characters on the island definitely had a variety of personalities but I did feel that the characters on the mainland were very similar and I couldn’t tell who was talking from time to time as their narrative voices sounded so similar. I also felt that the more interesting characters were killed off too early on which meant that I started losing interest further down the line as the characters became too similar.

The ending confused me initially but once I figured out what was going on I liked it. But due to the characters and less than engaging writing, the ending didn’t save the book and make it a better experience.

The next book I will be reviewing is another murder mystery, The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah.