Miyagaki Yotaro, the acclaimed mystery writer, lives in isolation in the remote Labyrinth House, a house designed by the notorious architect Nakamura Seiji – who also designed the Decagon House and the Mill House, among others. The Labyrinth House, as you might expect, consists of a maze of corridors and a number of isolated rooms. You can tell this isn’t going to end well…

Yotaro summons his four protegees, young crime authors, for a birthday party and a writing contest, but no sooner have things begun when the bodies begin to start piling up, killed in the manner of the stories the victims have written. Luckily, another guest who was invited was the sleuth Shimada Kiyoshi – but can he get to the truth while there is still anyone left alive? And what exactly is the truth, anyway?

If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll have seen that Seishi Yokomizo’s The Devil’s Flute Murders didn’t set my world on fire, so you might wonder why I then read an example of shin honkaku. Well, first of all, the more modern shin honkaku tends to have a bit more game-playing in the plotting, and, more importantly, I read The Labyrinth House Murders first. And I absolutely loved it. While it may well be lacking the insights into Japanese culture of Yokomizo’s work, as a mystery novel, this is on another level.

This was an absolute treat. I had one absolutely minor nitpick with the structure – the book-within-a-book doesn’t start at page 1 – but other than that…

It’s almost as if Ajaysuji read some of Carr’s twistier games that he plays with readers – The Nine Wrong Answers springs to mind, as does, to an extent, Seeing Is Believing and basically thought that Carr underplayed things and decided to outdo him. There are quite a few bits where my jaw just hit the ground as I realised that I’d been hoodwinked. Again.

I’m not going to give any details about the plot or the framing sequence. I don’t want to risk spoiling any of the fun and games. I sussed one or two bits of the solution but was a long way from guessing what was going on, and it was a delight when everything was explained. There’s a lot of clever stuff here and the less you know going in, the better.

So in case you hadn’t guessed – I loved this book, so much better than the preceding The Mill House Murders. Looking forward to the next one, The Clock House Murders.