#1449: The Ark (2022) by Haruo Yuki [trans. Jim Rion 2026]


Seven university friends go in search of a mysterious underground facility in the hills and, arriving late in the evening, encounter a family of three who have become lost walking in the same isolated region. The ten of them see no choice but to stay underground until morning, only for an earthquake to trap everyone inside. A means of escape exists, but requires that one person stays behind, trapping themselves underground where they might be lucky and not starve to death: instead, they may drown in the rising water filling the building from below. And so, naturally, one of the group is murdered. But why now? And, of course, whodunnit?

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#1431: The Clock House Murders (1991) by Yukito Ayatsuji [trans. Ho-Ling Wong 2025]


I haven’t loved these annual translations of the Bizarre House Mysteries series by Yukito Ayatsuji, but there can be no denying that they’re written with the precepts of the puzzle mystery — maximum confuse, maximum unlikely, maximum invention — front and centre, and as a puzzle-head myself I’d be a stick in the mud to not want to dive in to each new book. And The Clock House Murders (1991), newly translated by Ho-Ling Wong, might well be the most successful entry since opener The Decagon House Murders (1987), using its setting superbly in a way that I’m not sure the other books did and turning on a trick so ingenious that you can’t help but be impressed.

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#1278: The Labyrinth House Murders (1988) by Yukito Ayatsuji [trans. Ho-Ling Wong 2024]


Even before the sad death of John Pugmire, who brought us much in the way of foreign language impossible crime novels through Locked Room International, Pushkin Vertigo had started some heavy lifting in supplying us with ingenious puzzle plots from the other side of the language barrier. They’re not all bangers, of course, but the commitment Pushkin have shown, and continue to show if the raft of upcoming titles on their slate is anything to go by, is heartening for those of us who love a complex problem rigorously exploited. And The Labyrinth House Murders (1988) by Yukito Ayatsuji, recently translated by the talented Ho-Ling Wong, is certainly that.

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#1100: Death Within the Evil Eye (2019) by Masahiro Imamura [trans. Ho-Ling Wong 2022]

Death Within the Evil Eye

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“On the final two days of November, two men and two women shall perish in Magan…” — so sayeth the seer Sakimi, who has a fifty-year streak of being right about these things; thus, anyone in Magan would do well to clear out for the last two days of November. Just a shame that no-one told the nine people who have travelled to Magan at the end of November, some of them specifically to meet Sakimi, and that the message is only relayed as the sole bridge out of town goes up in flames. But, c’mon, prophecy belongs with zombies in the world of cheap and tawdry science fiction, so there’s no way that anyone is really at any risk….is there?

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#1082: The Mill House Murders (1988) by Yukito Ayatsuji [trans. Ho-Ling Wong 2023]

Mill House Murders

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The Decagon House Murders (1987, tr. 2015), the excellent first book in Yukito Ayatsuji’s series featuring the bizarre architecture of Nakamura Seiji, was translated into English so long ago that I hadn’t even started blogging at the time. Follow-up The Mill House Murders (1988, tr. 2023) was, then, much anticipated, and, for this reader at least, doesn’t quite merit the wait. While relatively swift, and enjoyably inventive as we’ve come to expect from shin honkaku, there’s a cleverness lacking in a story whose telling is marred by some unusual writing to the extent that I ripped through this without ever really relaxing into it. Like Soji Shimada, Ayatsuji has written a brilliantly clever debut and then suffered from Difficult Second Novel Syndrome.

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#918: The Life of Crime (2022) by Martin Edwards

Life of Crime

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To me falls the honour of rounding off the blog tour for The Life of Crime (2022) by Martin Edwards, adding to the deserved praise it has already garnered elsewhere. This “personal journey through the genre’s past, with all the limitations and idiosyncrasies that implies” is a monumental achievement, encompassing the breadth and depth of a genre that is now a good couple of centuries old, and finding many nuggets to share about it along the way. And, since any study of a genre must inherently be about that genre to some extent, Edwards’ trump card here is to tell a story of crime writing that also sheds light on the need for such stories to exist in the first place.

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#885: Death Among the Undead (2017) by Masahiro Imamura [trans. Ho-Ling Wong 2021]

Death Among the Undead

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Fourteen years and two disappointing sequels after the fact, it might be difficult to believe just how wild people went for the Matt Reeves-directed monster movie Cloverfield (2008) when it was first released. And I was reminded of that film when reading Death Among the Undead (2017, tr. 2021) by Masahiro Imamura for two reasons: firstly because of the time taken in both to ground the upcoming fantastical elements in enjoyably relatable worlds, and secondly because I cannot help but feel, now as then, that the praise heaped on both might be slightly overdone.

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