The Noh Mask Murder

The Chizui family has a strange figure wandering through their mansion at night. The figure is wearing the family’s supposedly cursed Noh mask. And this is but the start of a puzzling deadly sequence of events. The book starts with the author explaining to a friend that he wants to write a new kind o......more

4.25 🌞 A surprise mystery novel where the author is a side character (definitely the first of its kind). The way the murder mystery unfolds is unusual. There are so many twists and red herrings that if you don't pay close attention, you'll miss the clues. This was the case for me, so when I got to th......more

For long I've been fascinated by the mystery books of past masters from Japan and the extremely slow trickle of translated books available in English. The few that I've read sit very high in the writing quality and I read a fair bit of books. The late Akimitsu Takagi wrote prolifically in the 50's t......more

An aspiring mystery writer and his childhood friend must join forces to solve the mystery of a string of deaths in a prominent Japanese family that may be the result of an inherited curse. I've always enjoyed reading works in translation - they seem to bring you closer to the place in which they are......more

I received a review copy of this book from Pushkin Press via Edelweiss for which my thanks. If you thought like me that Anthony Horowitz’s ‘Hawthorne and Horowitz’ series makes for a clever and certainly different mystery series where the author is himself a character, the detective’s ‘Watson’ in fac......more