The Lying Detective

"Lies — and again lies. It amazes me, the amount of lies we had told to us this morning"

"Murder on the Orient Express" 

Huh, I always saw this book in the shops, with the obi (strip of paper with accolades etc on them) around the cover, so I never realized there was a third (upside-down) character beneath the obi! I did buy the book digitally, so I guess I should have seen the obi-less cover, but I honestly didn't realize there was someone there until I just looked for the cover image to accompany this reivew... 

What would you do if you came into a fortune? Well, buy a private island, build a strange house on it and commit a series of murders, of course! That's the thinking process of Sairi, a young woman who is a huge fan of mystery fiction. While her paternal grandparents were wealthy, her father eloped to marry the woman he loved (Sairi's mother), an act her grandfather never forgave his father. Her grandmother occasionally checked in on her child in secret. Recently, her grandfather died, soon followed by her grandmother, who left everything to her grandchild, making Sairi a very rich heiresss indeed. But, as mentioned earlier, she is also an enormous mystery buff, so she decides to use her money to enact a real murder mystery, one she will orchestrate. The idea is to create a closed circle situation on an island she inherited, in a curious house (she only needed to renovate the manor on the island) and then the rest is simple: invite a few people on the island, kill a few of them, create a scapegoat and "solve" the series of murders. Sairi has the house renovated to create a secret passageway that leads from the master bedroom to three of the guest rooms: the idea is to create a "locked room mystery" by killing one of the guests. She'll eventually also kill another guest, dress the scene as a suicide and make it seem they are the killer. The targets are two people she knows from the online mystery community and who ridiculed her attempt at writing a mystery novel when she was younger. They don't know the girl they mocked some years ago, is the same person as the rich heir who just happened to become mystery-community-friends with them on the internet recently and who oh-so-kindly invited them to her own private island to talk about mystery fiction and watch a rare mystery film together. Sairi has also invited a few other people, like a medical student and a police detective to "fill out the cast" of her very own murder mystery, all under the pretense she's just a mystery fan who has invited a few guests to indulge in their fandom. Sairi dubs her manor the Raia (Liar) House, an omen of what is to come. 

Sairi's only accomplice is Aoi, a former employee of her grandmother who is close in age to Sairi and who is quite sharp and willing to do anything as long as the pay is good, and the plan good enough to escape suspicion from the police. She is to act as Sairi's head maid and will help Sairi obtain an alibi for the murder. They also hire an extra maid, who will be an unknowing accomplice: this maid thinks they're playing a very realistic murder mystery role-playing game and will assist Sairi and Aoi. Under Aoi's guidance, Sairi plans out exactly what they all are going to do during this game of murder, with exact timings for when they'll cut off the island's Wi-Fi so they can't contact the mainland and have to wait for the scheduled boat to return to pick them up, to what everyone's story will be when they'll be interviewed by the police. The guests arrrive and all seems to go mostly as planned, though of course not all movements and actions by all guests can be predicted accurately. Things however go wrong when Sairi is all ready to commit the first murder: her victim doesn't appear at the time he was supposed to appear in a room, and she misses her opportunity to kill him while having an alibi. She falls asleep, but when she wakes up the following morning, her intended target is indeed found dead in his room, even though Sairi didn't commit the murder. Sairi doesn't understand what has happened, but she has no time to consider as her accomplice Aoi seems to proceed to the next step of their plan and thus Sairi sees how her plans seems to slip away from between her fingers and develop into a completely different game of murder in Origami Kyouya's Liar House no Satsujin (2025), or as the cover also says: The Liar House Murders. 

First time I read a novel by Origami and as I'm looking up her profile to write this review, I'm surprised to learn she's actually older than me: I met her and spoke briefly with her at the 2025 Honkaku Mystery Award ceremony and I honesly assumed she was younger or around the same age. Anyway, Liar House no Satsujin starts out as a hilarious novel, with a pleasantly insane protagonist who, having come into money, decides to use her wealth to create a real-life murder mystery, complete with actually killing people. The funny thing is, she isn't using her money in order to kill the people who once mocked her online: her main goal is to create a genuine "closed circle murder mystery in a bizarre house on an isolated island", and it just so happens there are a few people she could use as a victims for her plans. So yeah, she's funnily insane, and it shows in her conversations with Aoi, a cool-headed, capable assistant who makes sure Sairi doesn't make silly mistakes and is also quick to note she'll pretend she's completetely innocent and knows nothing about Sairi's plans if she were to mess up and the police would go after her. The eager would-be murdereress and her "I don't really care" assistant have some funny banter as they plan the murders, which are a mix of the practical and extravagant: Sairi has a secret passageway installed so she can commit a "locked room mystery", the idea being she'll have a perfect alibi if she retreats to her master bedroom with people watching her door and then use the secret passageway to commit a murder in a guest room further down the corridor. The banter between the two is genuinely hilarious, with Sairi making numerous references to mystery fiction (The Decagon House Murders is of course mentioned), but they also talk about how they'll make it a practical murder (yes, secret passageways are a bit of a cheat, but hey, it works!) and through their conversations, we learn the basic premise of their plans.

Sairi has invited "the perfect cast" for her murder mystery, which includes fellow mystery fans she got to know via the internet (including those who mocked her novel in the past, which she posted under a different nickname), and also a police detective and a so-called psychic, both acquaintances of her grandmother, under the pretense she wanted to talk with them to learn more about her grandmother, but in reality just invited because you need such characters in a murder mystery. So all is set for Sairi's plan to be set in motion, only for things to go not as planned straight on, with the first victim ending up dead, even though Sairi didn't do anything: a great premise for an intriguing mystery.

In fact, the initial moments of the book as Sairi and Aoi talk about mystery fiction and low-key bicker about the murder plans and them slowly setting things in motion (with Sairi sometimes making clumsy mistakes) are so much fun, it's a bit of a disappointment when the book moves away from that. For while we do follow Sairin as she slowly realizes her plans are not going as scheduled and having to figure out what to do next with her murder plans, the book also starts following the police detective and psychic characters, who actually know each other. They start investigating the first murder together and slowly start to suspect not everything is what they appear to be in the house. These two characters are just not nearly as fun to follow as Sairi and Aoi, and while their narrative/point of view is necessary to tell the type of mystery story Origami is telling here, the difference between the sheer joy of these two narratives is rather great, and I could feel myself getting disappointed again each time we moved away from Sairi's story back to the real detectives.

Sairi soon realizes someone on the island is a real murderer (let's forget she was also planning to kill people too) and she's quite confused about what to do: she can hardly confess she was planning to commit murder herself, but would it be wise to still continue with the rest of the plan? Would she be a prospective victim for the other killer? If the police would come, would they stumble upon the secret passageway and start viewing Sairi as the killer? Things are made more complicated because Sairi can't find a way to communicate with Aoi in private, meaning Sairi isn't quite sure whether her accomplice is or is not involved with the real murders herself or not. The suspense of realizing someone has somehow taken over her plot is pretty good, and again a reason why her segments are so much more fun than of the police detective and psychic, who are basically the 'reluctant police detective who works with a genius who also happens to be a womanizer' archetypes. 

Because we know what Sairi had originally planned to do to commit her murders (and we know she's crazy enough to convert the manor and island she inherited to act as the setting for her own murder mystery), it shouldn't come as a surprise the actual murders that are committed are a bit mundane in comparison. A lot of it is just the murderer making use of happy coincidences/turns of events, which are then made bigger because Sairi's becoming more and more confused as things develop in ways she hadn't expected. Origami does a good job with the clewing however, with even a cool twist near the end of the story that was very well set-up indeed, but one can't help but feel like Sairi's original plan still would've resulted in a more interesting detective story than the one that occured because someone sidelined Sairi's plans for their own series of murders. The book is fairly short, and things develop at quite a speedy pace, so there's barely any downtime, but that does mean there's little room for super deep deductions regarding each crime scene (yes, more than one). While Sairi is a mystery buff and she manages to come up with a few interesting theories/guesses regarding what's really going on in the house, it seldom becomes as complex as the complicated story set-up would suggest it could get. 

Still, I did enjoy reading Liar House no Satsujin: it's often a very funny book, obviously written by a fan of murder mysteries set in weird houses, written for fans of such stories. There are definitely times where I had hoped the mystery would become a bit deeper than it actually was, and the book is definitely at its best when you're following Sairi, and not the other two detectives, but overall, it's fairly enjoyable book that is also very easily to read, so perfect to read between heftier books.

Original title(s):  織守きょうや 『ライアーハウスの殺人』