Murder in the Crooked House

About

On a snowbound cliff overlooking icy seas at the remote northern tip of Japan, the Crooked House sits — a millionaire's eccentric architectural folly, where floors tilt, rooms shift, and nothing is quite level. When the guests begin to die in impossible circumstances, detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must solve a locked-room mystery inside a building that seems designed to make murder both inevitable and unsolvable. Soji Shimada's delightfully comic puzzler is a love letter to the honkaku tradition — Japanese detective fiction that prizes fair-play logic above all else. Every clue is visible to the reader; the solution, when it arrives, is simultaneously astonishing and inevitable. The crooked architecture is both setting and metaphor. A locked-room mystery inside a house that was crooked to begin with — and a challenge to every reader who thinks they can solve it before the detective does.