Specs
Reviews
(3.56/5)A very cute little mystery that I think was just right for me in terms of language learning. I was expecting sort of a Scooby Doo style talking dog solving mysteries setup, but it's actually a much more grounded take on both the "animal detective" and "kid sleuth" genres.
The dog, Chris, is a former police dog that gets retired from the force due to an incident that made her terribly afraid of bugs, and a shy young boy named Hinata ends up taking care of Chris because his family runs the local veterinary hospital and his grandpa used to train police dogs. The actual mystery isn't too hard to sus out if you're paying attention, I nailed both the culprit and the motive fairly early, but it was still satisfying to get it right and there are some red herrings that seem to leave things open for sequels.
I'd actually say the story is more about Hinata bonding with his dog than it is the mystery plot, though the mysteries are certainly present the whole time, and it was a nice slice of life in that regard. I liked that they explicitly say "this isn't a manga or a drama" and avoid a lot of the more irresponsible tropes of the kid detective genre. There's only really one major lapse in adult judgment which is pretty good compared to something like, Encyclopedia Brown and Hinata and his friend Mayuka who walks the dog with him don't deliberately stick their noses into dangerous affairs they don't belong in. It's more that in the process of taking care of Chris they happen to stumble onto clues because Chris is still in detective mode and finds things and I found that refreshing.
As far as language goes, this was perfect. I was generally able to read one chapter a nigh, although some crunch at work kept me away from the final three chapters for about a week. I was able to read quite a bit without looking things up, but there were some good set phrases I wasn't familiar with along with some daily life, pets, and police words I hadn't seen before. Best of all is this vocab gets repeated a lot which helps things stick. It was a fun little story and I imagine reading the others will help those words stick more, so I'm looking forward to the rest.
A cute dog and an akward kid, that teams up to solve a mystery
Entertainment - The story is about a boy, Hinata, who gets to foster a Shiba Inu that was trained to work for the police in search for clues. Both Hinata and the dog, Chris, have difficulties in life, while Hinata is described as being very bad at talking to people, Chris failed his first task because he got scared by an insect. The story was engainging enough that kept me going at a fast pace until the end.
Language Learning - The book holds value for language learners. It's a children's novel, with a couple of pictures here and there, much like a light novel aimed to a teenager audience. When I started reading this volume, I was around level 25-26 in WK (covered around 100% N5 Kanjis, 99.59% of N4 Kanjis, 87.58% of N3 Kanjis, 73.03% of N2 Kanjis and 37.77% N1 Kanjis) with roughly 2500 words learned and halfway N3 level in my grammar studies, the first 25% of the book felt a lot harder than I anticipated, which with time and exposure to the new vocabulary improved a lot and by the end I was reading comfortably with at most 3 -5 new words per/page needing to be searched. All words that utilize Kanjis have furigana attached to them which makes searching them in a dictionary a lot easier. The remark is that not all common words found in Kanji are represented here, so it's fairly common to find them written in kana only.
Overall - If you fill the profile I described above, I'd recommend the reading. It has vocabulary that can very much be used on daily basis and also vocabulary useful for those who want to read mystery/investigation type of books in the future.