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A logic puzzle in book form
This is a honkaku mystery, and the reader can really deduce the solution to the mystery after having been presented with all the facts. That's the only pleasure I got out of the book though, and even those facts were often tedious to read the first time, and definitely tedious to go over again when trying to work out the solution.
This could have been a good short story, but in my opinion it was way too long for what it offered, which was a long list of alibis and other dry facts among a lot of uninspiring dialogue. The characters were flat, more a list of names and roles than actual characters. I reached the end of the book and I still couldn't tell apart several of them.
To be fair, the book is probably targeted at a much younger audience than me, although this was never clearly stated. In retrospect, the fact that it takes place at a high school should have tipped me off.
The language is easy to follow for the most part, and there's a lot of dialogue throughout. I read along with the audiobook, and this helped fly through the dialogue. I suspect that I might have had trouble understanding who was speaking or in what way they meant what they were saying at some points if not for the audio, but it wouldn't have mattered much anyway.