Michael Primavera’s Reviews > The Mill House Murders > Status Update

He just. Conveniently didn’t see the note. After several times assuring the readers he would have seen it, he just missed seeing it… of course!

Most of this book is just set up, it’s all over-explained without even getting to the actual murder, oh my god.

This book has a very long setup that I’m afraid won’t pay off very well, the author seems more interested in recounting a murder rather than the clues to solve one. I’m also wondering the importance of the paintings, is it just a reason to gather a cast of characters, or do they play a greater role?

They have spent more than three pages dedicated to a semi-menacing note, going over the same details over and over again. This book is an incredibly slow burn, while there may have been a tragedy in the past, the present has nothing interesting to offer the story yet.

Soul read: Masaki is the murderer. He cut off his finger to hide his identity, and killed Furukawa by burning him in the furnace to make it seem like he died. That… or he’s again the murderer, but he somehow replaced Kiichi, and that’s why in the present it only refers to him in the first person.

Right now the constant jumping between past and present feels more like a gimmick than anything else, especially with how little changes between the two, it’s almost as if it was used to pad the books length. The relationship of Kiichi and Yurie is disturbing, but I can’t see the author going into the detail it deserves, but I’ll hold criticism until the end