"名探偵のいけにえ"(The Detective Massacre) by Tomoyuki Shirai Cover Illustration: Kouri Aoki
This story was based on a real event that happened at Peoples Temple in Guyana. The name of the characters are tweaked but it's definitely close to the actual person's name.
The story is set in November 1978. It started out with an intense scene where everybody in the cult at Guyana is forced to kill themselves. Then, the story goes back to Japan October 1978 where the protagonist, Detective Otoya finds out that his assistant Lilico went to Guyana and so he flies out of Japan to rescue her. Before the massacre, 3 people were murdered so Otoya and Lilico try to find the suspect. We see argument between the cult who believes that it is a punishment by God and the protagonist who believes this was murder.
This book was intense and had some brutal scenes that I did not expect at all from looking at this book cover. The story tells us that whether you are in a cult or not, people do the craziest things. I kind of wished the part where Otoya reveals the real murderer were shorter because it dragged. It was readable and was a page turner but that part felt long.
A mystery novel that if you don't arrive at the last 10% of the reasoning, you'll think “what a load of crap this is”. To put the only and highly condensed heavy-duty reasoning in the last few dozen pages, it is really confident. Because once someone doesn't make it past the first 90% (which isn't a small load), they can’t get to any of the good parts (horrible sunk cost setup).