Today: a book I should have read a different time.
Most knowledge on magic had been lost after the medieval witch hunts, but about a century ago, people started studying magic again. While many types of magic once known to the world are now still "lost tasks" (forgotten arts), magic has been developing as a genuine academic field of science and there are universities across the world that have a magic faculty. Mind you, this is no Harry Potter. One has to be born with the ability to perform magic and at the moment, there are only six known magicians on the world, who are all put under the supervision of the Order of Zenith (OZ), a governing agency located in the UK. However, "normal" people can still study the workings of magic and do research on it, similarly to how not all Literature students actually write literature. Japan has been one of the slowest countries to become accepting of magic and it was only this academic year that a university opened the very first Magic Faculty in Japan. Jousui University had more big news however: they managed to get Shiina Sakyou, one of the six magicians on this world, on board as one of their teachers. Some months have passed since their promising first adventure at the start of the academic year involving Shiina and his seminar class, and it's become summer. Shiina invites his class to a two-day outing to a university research facility in the mountains, though only Amane (the narrator) and Ririko are able to make it. Shiina will be going there to meet fellow magician and friend Simon L. SmithKlyne. Simon is the youngest known magician, whose powers first manifested after a horrible plane accident in which his parents died. His younger sister Juno was about to die too, but Simon miraculously managed to use healing magic to save her, even though healing magic is a Lost Task and nobody has managed to recreate that old art. Since then, Simon and Juno have been put in the custody of OZ, with Simon specializing in alchemy magic. Through a mutual friend, Simon has obtained a formula that might allow him to use resurrection alchemy, but the magic requires the powers of at least two magicians, which is why he has travelled all the way to Japan to Shiina, under the supervision of OZ guards.
Tricksters L is the second novel in Kuzumi's Tricksters series, but the third one I have read. Because, yep, I don't read things in order. Both the first Tricksters and Tricksters D (the third novel) were quite fun, so it was just a matter of time before I'd read more of this series, though I have to admit right now: I probably should have read this in order. Not because of spoilers or anything, but my timing of reading this book was just horrible, and it didn't help the experience at all. And there wasn't much this book could have done about that: it was just unlucky. Had I read this book months before, I would have liked the book much better.
About a month before I read Tricksters L, I happened to have read Konno Tenryuu's Renkinjutsushi no Misshitsu (2020), which also has the English title Alchemist in Locked Room. Which was a detective novel set in a world where alchemy exist. Okay, not a problem per se, though I hadn't expected this overlap in theme between the two books. Tricksters was about magic, and the first book introduced minor magic arts like locating people, but Tricksters L decided to focus on alchemy as a specific branch of magic, and little of the magic spells (and their specific rules/limitations) introduced in the first book returned in this book, as D was about alchemy. Fair. But then Tricksters D presented the plot of a mysterious death of an magician/alchemist in an underground lab, a locked underground lab to be exact, and a lot of the book revolving around the fact that only a fellow magician could have committed the murder inside a locked room, and of course, that our hero turns out to be that one person who could've been the murderer. Which is basically the same plot as Renkinjutsushi no Misshitsu, so you could imagine me being a bit disappointed reading these two books only two, three weeks apart. And what certainly didn't help was that ultimately, a lot of the ideas and concepts that make up the solution of both books are very similar. Strangely enough, despite mystery fiction often building on existing tropes and me practically only reading mystery, I don't experiece something like this often, and certainly not to the degree as this time.
Mind you, Tricksters L was released in 2005, and Renkinjutsushi no Misshitsu in 2020, so Tricksters D is of course the older one, and it's not like the solutions to both novels are exactly the same, but they do share a lot of similar ideas and that's why I already guessed what was going on very early in the book, for I still had the solution to Renkinjutsushi no Misshitsu in my mind. And if you know what happens in that book, it's very easy to apply some of the ideas seen there and see how they fit in Tricksters L and you'll realize that the two books are very similar, like a parallel world version. The idea on its own is still good, and ultimately, Tricksters L takes the idea to a different terminal station, and tells a very different kind of story based on the same idea, but still, it's easy to recognize that both books built upon the very same idea. As expected, the concept of alchemy does of course play an important role in this story, and while I think the "rules" of alchemy are not explored as much as the magic spells were in the first Tricksters, nor explained as detailed compared to the alchemy we see in Renkinjutsushi no Misshitsu, Tricksters L still manages to present a good, fair-play mystery set in a world with magic and alchemy. I do have to say that for a moment, I thought I was on the wrong track when a false solution was introduced which was to be completely honest, very memorable. Sure, the solution is proven to be wrong and if you take like a second to think about it, you realize very quickly why that particular idea to explain how the locked room was creeated wouldn't work, but the base dynamics/the foundation of that idea is wonderfully silly, really the kind of idea you only see in mystery novels, and the sort of idea you want to see in mystery novels. I would love to read a detective story that takes this solution and, with some tweaks, makes it the actual solution to a locked room mystery!
False solutions in general are a staple of the series by the way, which is partially why the series is called Tricksters: there's a lot of misdirection going in general, with false solutions being proposed by Shiina, Amane and others, and other misdirection going throughout the story that is only revealed at the end, and while these books are all very short, they usually manage to feel quite satisfying for puzzle plot lovers, as there's a lot of clewing and unraveling going on. While this second book doesn't go as far as the first book, which started with a sort of Challenge to the Reader announcing the reader will be fooled in seven different ways in the following chapters, it's still fun to see how in the end, Shiina and Amane reveal there was probably more misdirection going on than you might've expected at first.
Tricksters L had the unbelievable bad luck I happened to have read the one book on the world that is probably most similar to it just a few weeks before I started on Tricksters L. With similar motifs and even solutions that are at the care basically the same, you can understand why I felt a bit disappointed reading this book, even though it was not really the work's fault. Taken on its own, it's a perfectly enjoyable mystery novel, a bit short perhaps, but still fun and people who liked the first book certainly won't be disappointed by Tricksters L. The only tip I can give is really to not read this book and Renkinjutsushi no Misshitsu closely after another: there are just too many parallels and if you know the solution to one of them, it's really not hard to make the conversion and figure out what is going on in the other. Normally, I'd try to avoid spoiling this for other readers, but these two are just so incredibly similar and I really wouldn't want someone to have the same experience as I had. Let some time pass between the two books until you've forgotten the details.
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