Delicious Death for Detectives

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the gaming industry has seen an explosion in popularity. One of the most popular games ever released is Mystery Maker, a VR RPG where players can create baffling puzzles in a virtual space and challenge other players to solve them.

As a promotional stunt for the game’s upcoming sequel, eight real life great detectives have been hand chosen by Kurata Chikage, executive director of MegalodonSoft, to challenge each other to a match in a demo of Mystery Maker 2. Among them are Kamo Touma, a magazine contributor well known for his investigative work overturning false convictions, and his wife’s cousin Ryuuzen Yuki, a recently debuted mystery novelist.

However, on the day of the demo event, the detectives are all drugged. When they awaken, they find their smartwatches are locked to their wrists and they are shown videos of their families and loved ones being held hostage. They are contacted by a Gamemaster, who tells them that if they wish to save themselves and their families, they must play a death game called “Delicious Death for Detectives”.

As scheduled, the eight of them will play Mystery Maker 2’s demo, and the Detectives will challenge the mu*der puzzles created by the mu*derer. If the Detectives are not able to reveal the mu*derer and their tricks before the time limit, all players will be killed. However, if the mu*derer is exposed, both they and their hostages will be killed. And if a Detective makes an accusation but gets even the tiniest detail wrong, they will be mu*dered by the Gamemaster’s secret accomplice, the Executioner.

Now the only way for the eight detectives to survive is to expose the mu*derer and Executioner lurking among them, even if they must risk their lives and those of their compatriots to do so.

Which is an especially big problem for Kamo, because he’s the one who’s been chosen as the mu*derer!

Associated Names
One entry per line
A Sweet Death for the Famous Detective
Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo
名探偵に甘美なる死を
Related Series
The Time Traveler’s Hourglass (Prequel)
Recommendations
The Mystery Clock (1)
Recommendation Lists
  1. Mystery novels

Latest Release

Date Group Release
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... epilogue
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c13 part2
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c13 part1
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c12
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c11
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c10
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c9 part4
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c9 part3
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c9 part2
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c9 part1
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c8 part2
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c8 part1
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c7 part2
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c7 part1
11/23/23 Mitsuda Madoy’s... c6
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MitsudaMadoy
MitsudaMadoy rated it
November 23, 2023
Status: epilogue
The first word that comes to mind is "dense". Between the crimes that occur in the virtual world of Mystery Maker 2 and reality, five different mu*ders are given for the readers to investigate, four of them locked rooms and the remainder in a way that would probably been less mysterious if it were also a locked room. Kie Houjou expertly weaves evidence and narrative foreshadowing into every scene, ensuring that no matter how elaborate the solutions get, she can point to multiple pieces of specific setup that leave the... more>> reader unable to deny the truth.

And make no mistake, the solutions get extremely out there. A lesser author would have been content to let any one of these solutions carry an entire book on their own, especially the VR cases, where the full extent of the medium is taken advantage of to perform tricks that are completely impossible and abound with creativity.

As a mystery fan, I would have been content to have simply been given a case as fun to solve as this, but somehow there were enough pages left over to give the cast some decent character moments. I'm pretty jaded to tragic villain backstories, and I don't usually like it when the author gets too deep into their detectives as complex characters, but Houjou managed to do both in ways that, I'll admit, got me a little misty-eyed.

The only thing stopping me from giving this a completely unconditional recommendation is the awareness that it's a pretty high-level mystery, both in the sense that it kind of expects readers to come in with an awareness of the tropes (what stock characters the cast are representing, criticism the genre has received in the past, etc.) and in the sense that the case itself is incredibly complex. If mystery fiction is, as Carr said, the Grandest Game in the World, then DDfD is its Darker Side of the Moon.

But if that doesn't scare you, go ahead and play along. There's something for everyone here. <<less
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