It features all manner of puzzles, including locked rooms, jigsaws and magic tricks. Even the victims are nicknamed after such greats as Edgar Allan Poe, Baroness Orczy and Agatha Christie (whose And Then There Were None is the chief influence). The elaborate, super-ingenious solution to whodunnit is just about credible — even the mad “have their own reasons” — but Yukito’s main achievement is to combine such fun with an awareness that at its best the genre deals with “the suffering, the sadness, the pain and terror of death”.
