The book opens with a brief description of a corpse in the Australian outback and some events that occur on the Gulf of Mexico, and then starts flipping back between the Titanic and Ancient Egypt. The Egyptian story is about a girl that lives on an isle of reeds on the Nile who finds a mysterious box, while the Titanic story follows a writer who meets an Egyptologist, and the inevitable crash and sinking.
The issue is that these stories ultimately have absolutely nothing to do with the main plot, other than thematic connections and mood-setting. Certain events during the book do suggest (to the reader) that the modern murder is being influenced by the echoes of these events, but none of those leads ever actually come to fruition. I'm not opposed to mood and atmosphere, but Shimada spends 200 pages of a 600-page book on what is ultimately window dressing.
So it basically comes down to this: Crystal Pyramid is worth reading, but if you do, skip all the Egypt and Titanic chapters at the beginning. Trust me, you won’t miss anything. There might be one or two brief passages that don’t make complete sense, but nothing important.
Anyway. The majority of the book takes place in 1986, on a Egypt Island, a small island immediately on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico several miles from New Orleans. The Egyptologist Paul Alexson built a recreation of the Great Pyramid of Giza on this island, except the top half has a glass exterior—hence, the Crystal Pyramid. There is also a tower to the south of the pyramid, connected to the pyramid by a bridge at the top. Paul apparently had a crazy theory regarding the purpose of the pyramid, and built this recreation to test that theory. However, nobody knows what that theory was, why the top half of the pyramid was glass, or whether his experiment was successful, as Paul dies before the story begins, having been reported dead under mysterious circumstances in Australia.
Ownership of the pyramid is thus in the hands of Paul’s brother, Richard, who offers it to a Hollywood filmmaking studio as a set piece for a modern-day reimagining of Aida, starring Leona Matsuzaki (a returning character from a previous Mitarai novel).
Near the end of filming at this location, Richard is discovered dead in the top floor of the tower, which has been locked from the inside and completely sealed. What’s more, he apparently drowned, and in seawater. On top of that, the night before Leona claims to have seen a monster that looks like a man with the head of a jackal. The Alexson family (loosely based on the real life Winchester family) has always had a reputation for being odd, as they made their fortune from manufacturing weapons and are said to have been cursed by the victims of the weapons they produced. So was Richard’s death, and the weird circumstances surrounding it, caused by the workings of the pyramid, the Alexson family curse, “Anubis,” or something else?
The police and FBI investigate and obviously make no progress. They put pressure on the studio to halt production until the case is solved (both for reasons and with methods that are not entirely clear, but the contrivance is necessary to set the stakes). America’s best detectives are hired, but none can make any headway. The movie needs to release in early 1987 to be a success, and the absolute last day they can resume filming and still make that release date is soon only a few days away. Leona declares that she knows of a detective who can solve the case in that timeframe—in Japan. (Most of the book takes place in America, and features an amusing high number of instances of Americans randomly praising Japan or Japanese things out of nowhere, for reasons I can’t possibly fathom.)
A lot of this book is about the facts and crazy circumstances surrounding the case, and the grand adventure digging into the mystery of the pyramids. Mitarai doesn’t question witnesses, but explores the pyramids and goes scuba diving in the Gulf of Mexico, which almost makes the book read like a travel mystery. The pyramids are a source of real-life fascination of mystery, so weaving them into a murder mystery plot felt ambitious. Of course, a lot of time is also spent on Ishioka (Mitarai’s Watson) pining for Leona, Leona pining for Mitarai, and Mitarai acting depressed over his friend’s dead dog, which wouldn’t have been so bad if a third of the book hadn’t already been spent on the (ultimately pointless) Titanic and Egypt stories.
If there’s one major complaint I have about the book (besides wasting a third of the page count), it’s the diagrams. There are quite a number throughout the book, yet none explaining the solution, which is quite spatially convoluted. It would have been nice to have a diagram for the solution to help visualize it, especially considering there are several diagrams for trifling matters that end up completely irrelevant.
The solution is grand and ridiculous, and I’m not sure altogether fair, but it delivered on its promises. I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to fully enjoy the book because I had read Murder in the Crooked House, but it turned out to still be fine. There’s a lot of contrivance and silliness in the solution, but I was willing to let it slide considering how large and ambitious the plot was. Shimada loves his wild plots, and if you do too then Crystal Pyramid will be a great read. Or two-thirds of one, at least.
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