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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.