The Tokyo Zodiac Murders - Soji Shimada

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada, translated by Ross Mackenzie and Shika Mackenzie / ISBN 9781782271383 / 316-page paperback from Pushkin Vertigo

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One of The Guardian’s “Top 10 Locked Room Mysteries”

An amateur detective races against the clock to solve a decades-old murder mystery in this “bloody and bizarre” crime novel with a twist hailed as “one of the most original”—an unmissable triumph of Japanese literature (Daily Mail).

Astrologer, fortune teller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must solve a macabre murder mystery that has baffled Japan for 40 years—in just one week.

With the help of his freelance illustrator friend, Kiyoshi sets out to answer the questions that have haunted the country ever since: Who murdered the artist Umezawa, raped and killed his daughter, and then chopped up the bodies of six others to create Azoth, ‘the perfect woman’?

With maps, charts, and other illustrations, this story of magic and illusion—pieced together like a great stage tragedy—challenges the reader to unravel the mystery before the final curtain falls.

This quintessential Japanese “logic mystery”—eerie, gory, and intriguing—combines the puzzle-solving of Golden Age Western detective fiction with elements of shocking horror and dark humor.

"A sprawling, multi-faceted epic... The solution to the mystery is deceptively simple, and yet I can honestly say I have never read one quite like it anywhere else. This book is an unmissable triumph." --Publishers Weekly