十津川警部「スーパー隠岐」殺人特急

Not awful, but not good enough to recommend either

I was on the fence about whether to give this two or three stars. It's easy to read, I didn't dislike it when I was reading it and read through it quite quickly, and the central plot idea is good (which argue for three stars), but fails on dialogue, characterisation and prose quality. I finally came down on two stars because I don't plan to read any other books by this author.

This book is in the "travel mystery" subgenre, where the action is set in various touristy locations in Japan. I don't feel like it really manages to evoke the feeling of those locations, though. Nor are any of the characters particularly memorable, and I never felt like I had much sense of the lead detective's personality. The thing you're really reading for is the central idea of what's going on, which I think is original and interesting. But ultimately that's not enough for me to save this book: there are better mystery authors even in this subgenre.

The author's prose is straightforward and easy to read, and he has a tendency to have characters restate plot points and theories, so you're not likely to get lost. He has a weird style quirk where he uses a very large number of commas; here's an example from the first few pages of the book:

菅原は、それを見て、彼女の手から、落ちそうになっている、ミカンを、そっと取り上げた。そして、自分も、目を、閉じることにした。

Usually when an author is generous with commas this makes the text easier to read because it helps to clarify the parsing of the sentences. But here there are so many commas that they stop being useful hints and instead are just weirdly distracting.

Apparently the author's first book or two are quite good, but this one is from near the end of a career where he turned out over 600 books. Prolific doesn't have to mean bad (I love 赤川次郎 books), but I think it does mean that any one book is probably a reasonable sample of the whole and it's unlikely that there's massive variation in quality between books.

If you want a good travel mystery, try something by 内田 康夫.