Key Points
In Japanese author Soji Shimadas debut novel, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981), for example, a murder mystery fan and his artist friend set out to dig into the serial killings of six women the daughters and nieces of an artist named Heikichi Umezawa..
Writing on the mirror, messages in blood, invisible ink and puzzles that unlock to reveal a clue: When a murder mystery holds within it a completely different puzzle one that the reader can participate in directly, turn the page upside down to view anew it can certainly elevate the plot..
Think of the ambigrams, ancient art and Fibonacci-linked maths in Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code (2003; about a symbologist helping with a murder investigation, who ends up also trying to track down the Holy Grail) and the substitution ciphers and labyrinthine library in Italian semiotician Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose (1980; about an abbey with a secret night life and a series of seven bizarre deaths)..
Icelandic murder mysteries and the larger genre of Nordic noir twisted stories set in the frozen tundras of Scandinavia are, in fact, storming genre bestseller lists (think of the Swedish detective series Joona Linna by the husband-wife duo Lars Kepler, or the books by Jo Nesbo), aided by the spate of recent screen adaptations by streaming platforms..
For an interesting take on the unreliable narrator device, see the Korean novel The Good Son (2016) by You-Jeong Jeong, in which a young man wakes to find that he has killed his mother, and must now attempt to piece together truths he cannot vouch for, in a mind turned cloudy by years of seizures, medication and life with a domineering parent..
