Breakaway Books

Authored by Yukito Ayatsuji; Published 1987; Mystery

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

I’m told that The Decagon House Murders is a classic, and it’s easy to see why. It’s an excellent whodunnit, a challenging puzzle that also manages to be a bit spooky.

In The Decagon House Murders, seven Japanese college students, all members of a mystery enthusiast club, travel to an isolated island off the mainland of Japan, where a reclusive and eccentric man recently lost his life. It quickly becomes apparent something is horribly amiss, and the students start to die one by one—murdered. Can they discover who the murderer is in time to save themselves?

If you are a true connoisseur of mysteries, you won’t find any twists in this novel that will surprise you. But when this was initially published in 1987, I imagine that it was a revelation. The students are isolated on an island and facing a psychotic killer, as amateur detectives on the mainland race to figure out what’s happening? It’s both intellectually challenging and a pulse-pounding mystery. Nowadays the set up is a little more familiar, but I can’t help but think it wasn’t quite so familiar back in the day. Today it reminds me of the reality show Traitors, with the suspects slowly being whittled down by murder as the paranoia among the survivors increases.

The characters aren’t really the draw for this novel. They are meticulously portrayed, seven portraits of seven kids who love mysteries for different reasons. But all of them are too meticulously portrayed for a reader to really love them. Each character has their own mild annoyances that grated at me but are perfect for the mystery in which they have a part to play. Even the sleuths looking into the crime on the mainland aren’t easy to root for, with Shimada in particular striking me as quite tone deaf and frankly, annoying. Perhaps unsurprisingly because of the publication date in the 1980s, I also did not love the hysterical nature in which the women are portrayed.

The Decagon House Murders will keep you entranced all the way through, if not enamored with the cast. You may guess the murderer, but you’ll definitely wonder how they did it.