This book is crazy. And not in the "that was so crazy, dude!" way. In the "needs serious help and should be locked away until it's no longer a threat to itself and others" way.
An isolated house in the rain... A series of gruesome, themed murders... And a wimpy kid who has to solve them all.
These are the elements that make up Nagomu Ichiyanagi.
Should this game have been called "Phoenix," or would that have been a bit too on-the-nose? Maybe, maybe not, since it wasn't clear what remnants or ashes had to do with anything in the game.
If Remnant: From the Ashes needed to be condensed down to one phrase, it'd be "procedurally generated shooter Souls-like," which I think does a pretty good job of covering the game's essential and unique features. I see it as a combination of two twists on the traditional Souls-like formula: the first is making it a shooter and the second is making it semi-random. These are neat ideas with decent execution, but also a few issues.
Tick... tock... tick... tock...
Attorney Shunsaku Morie is a simple man. He just wants to go to his client, do his job, and go home. Nothing fancy. But when his job involves reading the will of a wealthy, eccentric hermit in the deceased's mansion filled with a collection of antique clocks, whose family includes an assortment of odd characters (including a man covered in bandages), even Shunsaku can tell where things are headed.
Besides that, this novel is pretty good.
The Body in the Library begins, shockingly enough, with a body in a library. Scandalous!
The servants at Gossington Hall in St. Mary Mead discover a body in the library one morning, sending the household into a tizzy. In the introduction of the book it felt like the story was so preoccupied with its central conceit (that there was a body in the library!) I was worried it would shirk its duty to provide a compelling mystery, but that fortunately turned out to be a misplaced fear.
To be honest, I find the title of Hercule Poirot's Christmas a bit strange. It features Hercule Poirot and takes place around Christmas, but it's not about Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Oh well, the fact that the mystery is decent is more important than the title Christie chose for it.
Knock-knock.
Who's there?
If I just told you, it wouldn't be a very satisfying mystery.
A boy and a girl. They're from worlds as different as can be—
No, really, they're from actual different worlds. Rime lives in a world of frigid winter, while Ember hails from a land of fiery summer, and they're separated by a magical, transparent barrier. But when they fall down the chasm separating their homes, they need to work together to figure out how to return.
Trick is hands-down my favorite mystery TV show, and a serious contender for my favorite piece of mystery media ever. The leads are entertaining and have great chemistry, the world of Trick is silly but enthralling, the tricks—a component so important the show is named after them!—are wonderful, and the show manages to achieve a near-perfect balance of mystery and comedy. There are some points where Trick goes out on a limb which promptly snaps, but it's Trick's willingness to take things as far as it needs to, even if it doesn't always quite work out, that makes it so great.
Of course, you've probably already noticed that this post is not about Trick, but a book called The Demon-Mask Village Murders, which is not a Trick tie-in novel or anything of the sort, but has what I can only describe as big Trick energy.
In my Village of Eight Graves review, I mentioned how one of the reasons I felt I didn't find it majorly compelling was because other works have done the "creepy rural Japanese village" thing better. Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits was one particular work I had in mind. It's a book about a creepy rural Japanese village (shocking, I know) but goes all-in on that premise, blending orthodox murder mystery with Japanese horror.