I heard about this book when Grace/Curious Book Reviewer talked about this book. Although I loved Tokyo Zodiac Murders, I didn’t know that there was a sequel so I immediately got this from the library.

Murder in the Crooked House is about a series of locked room murders. Kozaburo Hamamoto, a wealthy businessman, has called for an exclusive Christmas party. Along with his daughter, Eiko Hamamoto, and staff, they host: Eikichi Kikuoka (President of Kikuoka Bearings), his secretary/mistress Kumi Aikura, his chauffeur Kazuya Ueda, Michio Kanai (executive at Kukuoka), Kanae’s wife, Hatsue, two students (Shun Sasaki and Masaki Togai), and Hamamoto’s grand-nephew Yoshihiko Hamamoto. There are quite a cast of characters, especially when you consider the fact that four police officers are added after the first murder!

Going back to the topic, since I got distracted with the characters, everyone has gathered at this strange house that leans (hence it’s a crooked house). They have a good first day, and wake to find that Kazuya Ueda, Kikuoka’s chauffeur, has been murdered in a locked room! The police are called but due to the snow storm, they can do no more but stay in the house and guard everyone. This doesn’t work out, because Eikichi Kikuoka is found dead the next morning, also in a locked room. The detectives despair of finding the murdered and that is when Detective Mitarai (and his trusted friend Ishioka) are called in.

Comparing this book to the first, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, I can pretty confidently say that I prefer the first book. The first book expertly combined mystery and a hint of the supernatural and, more importantly, introduced Mitarai and Ishioka earlier. In Murder in the Crooked House, Mitarai and Ishioka don’t appear until the end, very much like the Miss Marple series. This wouldn’t be a problem if there was a decent detective to investigate, but while the four detectives do their best, they tend to blend in with one another and it story just seemed to flowed until it reached the point where Mitarai was called in.

That said, the dynamics here were fantastic. The book covered subtle class warfare (Eiko vs the other two women), the boss vs underling relationship (Kanai being a boot-licker even though his wife had an affair with his boss in the past), the motive for revenge, and towards the end, friendship. It was like having a microcosm of society in that one house and watching how people behaved in public vs in private (especially for the two couples) was fascinating.

The mystery was also very ingenious. There are quite a few drawings here that you’ll need to understand if you want to solve the mystery by yourself, but it was quite beyond me and I was happy to let Mitarai do all the work. I thought that the solution of the locked room mystery was ingenious but still plausible.

Overall, this is a great sequel to The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. If you had to choose between the two, I’d recommend the first book, but if you have the time, you should definitely read both.