The book takes place in a world where detectives are licensed and official members of the police force, brought in to solve “intellectual” crimes that straightforward forensic work can’t crack. The story centers on the impeachment trial of detective Tooru Akutsu, who stands accused of a litany of malfeasance in the cases in which he’s been involved. The licensed detective system is relatively new, so this is a trial run (pun intended) of how a detective impeachment would work.
While the impeachment trial is the main story, chronologically the story begins several months before the trial, with a case where Akutsu essentially goads the culprit into killing the brother of Akutsu’s assistant Tsukasa in order to force the culprit into creating decisive evidence. When Tsukasa discovers that Akutsu essentially engineered his brother’s death, she naturally gets upset with Akutsu and swears vengeance.
Or maybe it’s more appropriate to say the story begins 19 years before that, when Akutsu was discovered inside a locked room with a little girl who had been brutally hacked into pieces. While Akutsu immediately confessed when questioned by the police, at trial he suddenly claimed his confession had been coerced and obtains an acquittal by brilliantly proving the crime must have been committed by a third party. Of course, there’s one person who doesn’t buy this story: Kengo Kurosaki, the detective who questioned Akutsu and knows for a fact the confession wasn’t coerced.
Yet Akutsu’s acquittal implies his confession was forced, leading to public humiliation and loss of social standing for Kurosaki—which is what drove him to initiate the impeachment and find other people—such as Tsukasa—who were wronged by Akutsu’s method of handling cases.
So the impeachment trial is a vehicle through which the book explores and ties together these other cases from Akutsu’s past. And if this didn’t already sound complicated enough, I haven’t even gotten to the ghosts yet.
Yeah, there are ghosts in the book. Real live ghosts. Okay, maybe not “live.” But they exist, and in fact the character that’s closest to being the protagonist is a ghost. As expected for a modern Japanese mystery novel with supernatural elements, the ghosts abide by explicit rules. So how do you have a “mystery” novel with ghosts that can presumably just tell you what happened? I’ll let you find that one out on your own.
The first half of A Great Detective Never Lies provides setup and background for the trial, which doesn’t begin until the second half. So you’d probably expect the impeachment trial to be the meat of the story, diving deep into the details and logic of the relevant cases… but instead the trial serves mostly as a summary of the information established in the first half. There is a meaty story contained in the book, but it has lots of baggage and requires tons of setup to work, which is reflected in the book’s page-count. The question is, is the payoff worth it?
Ace Attorney very obviously had a large influence on A Great Detective Never Lies, and in fact I’d probably say it had the largest influence. (If the fact that the novel is all about a trial wasn’t enough of a giveaway, there’s a chapter called “Reunion, and Turnabout”.) There is one particularly Ace Attorney-esque sequence, and much of the logic of the book is built around finding contradictions. As a diehard Ace Attorney fan, I always love experiencing (well-crafted) works inspired by the franchise.
But here that inspiration serves as a double-edged sword because, while the nods and references make me smile, I also immediately jumped to the solution once a certain clue was revealed, as the ultimate answer feels like a slight twist on the solution of an actual Ace Attorney case. Perhaps I would have solved the book regardless (I am a big-brain intellectual after all), but having Ace Attorney on the forefront on my mind certainly didn’t help. It’s the Danganronpa problem: solving a mystery is fun, but waiting for the characters to catch up to you is not.
So circling back to the question, is the setup and page-count worth the story we’re given? I’d say it pays us what we’re owed, but nothing more. In the book’s defense, the “essential clue” is revealed fairly late, so I wasn’t waiting that long for the characters to catch up (unlike Danganronpa where the cases can mostly be solved from the first scene of the investigation).
This is a fun debut work by Atsukawa. It feels almost like an Ace Attorney fancase that needs to reestablish all the lore, rules and atmosphere because it can’t use the “Ace Attorney” name, which in turn bloats it and causes it to lean on Ace Attorney plot beats perhaps a bit harder than it should, but it’s still an entertaining romp and I look forward to seeing what Atsukawa does in the future, especially if he can carve out his own ideas.
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