Specs
Reviews
(3.45/5)Short, funny, good quality detective puzzles!
This is a great book for anyone who enjoys a good puzzle mystery. The mysteries are all pretty fair, with original solutions, and the interaction between the detective (who is secretly a rich girl) and her acid-tongued butler who always works out the solution before her are hilarious. The book is divided into sections, one for each mystery so you can feel a sense of achievement as you complete reading each short story. I would buy other books buy this author based on this.
Basic detective comedy
As a note, I only listened to the audiobook, I do not own the text.
The audiobook was at the upper edge of my current listening abilities. If I didn't focus it was easy to lose the thread of what was happening. However, when I did focus I could tell where it would fall compared to texts I've read so I feel comfortable grading it. To get by with this book you will need a decent (but not extensive) crime vocab and comfort with formal speech. The acting is a bit tropey. You'll understand when you hear the butler talking. Lots and lots of 左様でございます from him and なんですって！ from the お嬢様.
I'm not entirely sure why this book won an award. It's a pretty much a bog standard detective comedy. It reminds me a lot of 押井刑事 honestly. As such, I wonder if the TV show based on it is better (certainly true for the other book). I can't say I enjoyed it much, but I didn't dislike it enough to stop it midway. It was good training for my ear as so far I've been listening to easier books.
The tl;dr of the plot is that a rich girl is working as a detective with a boss who is horrible at deduction. Her butler, on the other hand, is excellent at it. She explains the cases to him and he solves them.
Edit: I recently had a Japanese acquaintance refer to this as a children's book, and reframing in it that light, it's probably a 4/5. For adult fiction it's honestly pretty bad, but for something aimed at middle schoolers it's appropriate.
nice mix of humour with satisfying puzzle-type mysteries
(Review date: Feb 2012)
This is a humorous set of murder mystery stories, which won the Honya Taishou booksellers' prize in 2011.
Reiko Houshou is a police detective, who investigates (along with her idiot boss) the murders in this series of stories. However Reiko is (though she keeps it hidden from her coworkers) in fact a classic example of the spoiled rich o-jou-sama character, and it's actually her butler who does most of the actual solving of the crimes...
The humour is driven mainly by the characters, especially the interaction between Reiko and her butler Kageyama; the latter manages to get away with being exceedingly rude because he's much better at Reiko at figuring out what's actually going on, so she can't fire him. The mystery element is provided by locked-room/whodunnit style puzzles which fit in well with the light tone of the writing.
I found this book a straightforward read, on the easy end of 'moderate difficulty'. There were occasionally bits of vocabulary I had to look up to make sure I wasn't missing a plot point, but mostly I didn't need to resort to the dictionary.