Death Within the Evil Eye / 魔眼の匣の殺人

It’s difficult to succeed genius. Chrono Cross isn’t as good as Chrono Trigger, Bioshock 2 isn’t as good as Bioshock, and National Treasure 2—okay, that one is basically perfect. When you create something truly special, you’ve set a high bar for yourself, which makes it that much more difficult to overcome. And yet Death Within the Evil Eye… succumbs to this pitfall, as it’s good, but just doesn’t quite have the same magic as Death Among the Undead.

In the aftermath of Death Among the Undead, our protagonists get a lead on the organization behind the incident in the first book and follow it to an abandoned research facility hidden deep within the mountains. Along the way they meet several other people who “just happen” to be heading to the same area. When they arrive, the only person still living at the facility is an old woman who claims to be able to predict the future—and she has predicted that, over the next two days, two men and and two women in the area will die. 

When the group tries to leave they discover the bridge to the facility has been burned down, stranding them on one side of a gorge. They are thus stuck as they wait to see whether the prophecy of death comes true or not. However, they discover that one member of the group has the power of foresight as well. Are the fortune-telling powers real or hoaxes? And will the group be able to overcome the prophecy of death? 

So, like Death Among the Undead, Death Within the Evil Eye is a hybrid mystery, this time focusing on prophecies and predictions. In Death Among the Undead, the “hybrid element” took over every facet of the story once it was introduced—while still remaining a fair-play mystery, which is what elevated the work. In contrast, the prophecies in Evil Eye feel more like a backdrop against which the action occurs. The prophecy is always looming in the background, but doesn’t actively shape the story the same way as was done in Undead. 

Evil Eye is good, and the tricks are fine, but it doesn’t have that special something to elevate it in the same way Undead did. I don’t think the tricks are worse on an individual level than in Undead, but they don’t come together and tie into the hybrid element in the same cohesive way. There are some tropes involving predictions that Evil Eye avoids, which may be intentional—but sometimes tropes are tropes because they’re good. 

The suspects also fare the same as in Undead: they all have pun names and are reasonably differentiated but not particularly nuanced or memorable. They’re personas meant to act out the murder play, not be real people, and accomplish that job satisfactorily. 

For the core cast, it was interesting seeing how Evil Eye built upon the characterization and story of Undead, especially since mystery novels tend to operate in isolation of each other, but it also felt like Evil Eye tried a bit too hard to remain “spoiler-free” for Undead. (Probably the same as I’m doing—at a certain point, you veer so close to spoilers that it just seems easier to drop the facade, doesn’t it? And Evil Eye doesn’t even have the luxury of avoiding proper nouns.) 

Death Within the Evil Eye is a good novel that’s worth reading—it’s just not a masterpiece like Death Among the Undead.