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.
Children, incarnations of The Doctor, phases of the moon…generally I try not to play favourites. But if I had to pick one crime fiction conceit above all others it would undoubtedly be a group of people on an island getting killed off one by one. Sure, isolate them in some ancestral mansion via thunderstorm or on a train via unexpected snow and the effect is arguably the same, but there’s something about the island in itself that renders the idea all the more thrilling to my senses. And so this Japanese island-set puzzle, the second collaboration between Locked Room International’s John Pugmire and translator 
The Invisible Event 