The Decagon House Murders

The lonely, rockbound island of Tsunojima is notorious as the site of a series of bloody unsolved murders. Some even say it's haunted. One thing's for sure: it's the perfect destination for the K- University Mystery club's trip.--Page 4 of cover.

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"Read Yukito Ayatsuji’s landmark mystery, The Decagon House Murders, and discover a real depth of feeling beneath the fiendish foul play.
 
Taking its cues from Agatha Christie’s locked-room classic And Then There Were None, the setup is this: The members of a university detective-fiction club, each nicknamed for a favorite crime writer (Poe, Carr, Orczy, Van Queen, Leroux and — yes — Christie), spend a week on remote Tsunojima Island, attracted to the place, and its eerie 10-sided house, because of a spate of murders that transpired the year before. That collective curiosity will, of course, be their undoing.
 
As the students approach Tsunojima in a hired fishing boat, 'the sunlight shining down turned the rippling waves to silver. The island lay ahead of them, wrapped in a misty veil of dust,' its sheer, dark cliffs rising straight out of the sea, accessible by one small inlet. There is no electricity on the island, and no telephones, either.
 
A fresh round of violent deaths begins, and Ayatsuji’s skillful, furious pacing propels the narrative. As the students are picked off one by one, he weaves in the story of the mainland investigation of the earlier murders. This is a homage to Golden Age detective fiction, but it’s also unabashed entertainment."

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Yukito Ayatsuji (Author)

Yukito Ayatsuji (born 1960) is a Japanese writer of mystery and horror novels. He started writing as a member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club, a society dedicated to the writing of fair play mysteries inspired by the Golden Age greats, which inspired the club featured in The Decagon House Murders and has nurtured many of Japan's greatest crime writers.The Decagon House Murders was Ayatsuji's debut and is considered a landmark crime novel in Japan, where it revived the traditional puzzle mystery format and inspired a new generation of writers. It is the first of Ayatsuji's works to be translated into English.