![]() He appears to suffer a set-back when a further guest dies, but eventually gathers those who remain to explain what has been going on and to unmask the culprit. Police HQ send Mitarai, who has a reputation for solving such cases. Local police call in a senior man from Tokyo, but the presence of several officers in the house does not prevent further deaths. ![]() Death comes in the form of a large hunting knife, but strangely each victim is found alone in a locked room. Hamamoto has invited business partners and underlings to his house for a holiday break while the snow falls outside, to sample gourmet food and view his collection of automata and dolls. ![]() The interior of the house is equally strange, with metal stairs in inconvenient places and odd openings in the walls. The house leans some five or six degrees to the vertical, as does the adjoining tower, a copy of the Leaning Tower of Pisa but with an exterior faced in glass. The setting is Ice Floe Mansion, a weird house built on the most northerly point of the Japanese mainland by a rich industrialist, Hamamoto. To assist those who fail to do so, the unorthodox detective Mitarai is introduced to explain events in the final chapters. As with the first, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, the author sets up a complex and bizarre series of deaths, creating a puzzle which the reader is invited to solve. This is the second work by Soji Shimada re-issued by Pushkin Vertigo, a book first published in Japan in 1982. ![]()
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