Top 5 Taped Room Mysteries

While you’ll often hear hardcore, borderline obsessive mystery fans talking about locked room mysteries, there’s one type of such a room that I feel triumphs over the others—the taped room. While typical locked rooms have all their exists locked or blocked off in some way, taped rooms go a step further, ensuring that nothing—not even

The Christmas Miracle Crimes

I’ve never understood the interest in seasonal mysteries. Christmas is a time of birth and hope (or generosity and compassion in secular circles). Taking the atmosphere and shoving in a murder always felt incongruous to me, but people sure like to attempt it. However, thanks to today’s book, I can kind of see the appeal.

Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney Manga (vol. 3 & 4)

You might recall me discussing the Miles Edgeworth Ace Attorney Investigations manga on this blog, or perhaps you’ve never heard of it before and are wondering who this strange man with the wrinkly ascot is. Either way, you can click here to view my thoughts on the first four cases and an overview of the

Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney Manga (vol. 1 & 2)

While I started out reading juvenile mysteries like Ron Roy’s A to Z Mysteries or watching mystery thrillers like Castle, Ace Attorney was the series that had the most influence on me. I started playing the series in high school and was hooked. It might look like a funny anime lawyer game, but it’s full

The Devotion of Suspect X

I really like this book. I could possibly just end it there. Something about this book goes beyond mysteries and crime fiction for me. Reading it feels like being submerged in a dream-like world, yet it’s completely bounded in reality. Indeed, the characters are some of the realest I’ve encountered in a long while. I

Monkey See, Monkey Murder

Mysteries and monkeys have a surprisingly deep history, one that’s often written in tears. You might start with a perfectly capable writer, but the moment they try to put a monkey in their story, they lose their minds. I’ve seen it theorized that it’s a curse involving a particularly influential detective story (whose identity I’m

The Author is Dead

I’ve been on a bit of a self-published mystery kick lately. It’s hard for me to say why. Maybe because they feel a bit more honest than traditionally published books—like I’m getting an unfiltered look at the author’s soul, with the good and the bad. Maybe it’s that they tend to be more economic with

The Files of Young Kindaichi (2022)

I love goofy adaptations of stories—things that make you think, why on earth did they bother making this? I played a Switch version of Christie’s ABC Murders in lieu of reading the book, and I suspect it improved my experience, and I discovered Hajime Kindaichi through a random Hulu show with a kickass opening cinematic,

Gray Gaynes: Gray Tones & Gray Area

Recently, more and more authors are turning to self-publishing. Whether this is effective is not a conversation I’m qualified to have, but it has opened the door to more classically-oriented (i.e. “good”) mystery novels that publishing houses tend to ignore. However, in many cases these novels are rife with editing boo-boos and questionable characterization, so

The Black Spectacles

For whatever reason, I’ve always been nervous about writing on Carr novels. I feel like his reputation is already so cemented that I don’t have much to add. However, despite having only read about six of his books, Carr remains the gold standard I compare a lot of mysteries to (at least in the construction