Specs
Reviews
(3.57/5)5 short murder mysteries with a scientific spin
The first of the Detective Galileo series, it contains 5 short stories of 60-70 pages each.
Content: Compared to 容疑者Xの献身 (the 3rd book in the series), which is one long story, the nature of the short stories leave little room to create a multifaceted cast or complicated case. The cases are overall rather simple, for all that they feature some scientific phenomenon. About a third of each story was the 種明かし. You do get some familiarity with and background information about the recurring cast throughout the cases, though.
Language: Little furigana. Grammatically, the language used is very uncomplicated. The vocabulary as well is overall on the simple/every day side. There is also terminology related to the murder cases and scientific experiments/explanations that is the exception to this, though. Perhaps due to being multiple shorter cases which required some new background information each time, the vocabularly felt a bit more difficult compared to 容疑者X. For someone with a good base vocabulary and understanding of grammar, I'd say it is easy enough to fill in the gaps with context and a dictionary.
The short story collection (five stories) that started the Detective Galileo series. In my opinion, nowhere near as good as his famous 容疑者Xの献身.
Mainly, the inclusion of a “scientific phenomenon” in each story felt a little forced. Most of those aren’t really believable even if you’re feeling kind, on top of leaving little space for the rest of the investigation. On the plus side, if you’re into this series this book will give you a few snippets of info on the main characters’ backgrounds.