Book Review Reasoning

Soji Shimada, who is known as the "Japanese mysterious god" and "Neo-Zoroastrianism", is the author of "The Star Killer". This article is also the first appearance of Soji Shimada detective Kiyoshi Mitarai. Soji Shimada made his debut in 1980 with a book of 186000 words, which opened up a brand-new road for the development of Japanese and even world mystery literature under the current situation that social groups dominated the mystery novel market at that time.

Recommended index: ← Samsung and a half (out of 5? )

The following may involve some spoilers!

This book is about a serial murder case that happened in astrology 40 years ago (1936), which caused a sensation all over Japan, and the murderer was not found for 40 years.

First, the painter Mei Zeping Ji was beaten to death in the secret room, then his eldest daughter who had been married for a long time was raped and killed at home, and finally all six daughters who lived with him disappeared. Bodies were found buried all over Japan, and everyone was cut off!

According to the notes left by Mize Pinji, in order to make the female "Asod" have a perfect figure, the body parts of six young virgins represented by their respective constellations were cut off. Forty years later, the legendary "Asod" has not been found.

If you are a mystery fan, when you read this book, you will definitely think of Young Bao Qingtian or Young Notebook of Jin Tianyi. At that time, the story about six bodies actually composed of five people in Young Bao Qingtian was accused of copying the story book of Jintian Youth. However, all these are actually modeled after the killing magic in astrology.

I remember the first time I saw the splicing of corpses in the book of Jintian teenagers, which was very shocking, but in the book of the star killer, this technique was written more delicately and without flaws.

But why, as the originator of this technology, the spread of astrological killing magic is far less than that of juvenile notebooks in Bao Qingtian and Jin Tianyi?

This is the 3.5 I gave this book? Reason. A good mystery novel, of course, beautiful techniques are very important, but the novel is for people to read. In astrology, I think the most deadly thing is a lot of overly complicated descriptions.

I remember a netizen left a message "astrology kills demons", just need to read the first chapter and the last two chapters. Although this statement is a bit extreme, it is enough to see the verbosity of this book.

The author created many characters with a lot of pen and ink. These characters have a short appearance time and are unwilling to get involved in the case, which consumes readers' reading energy. At the same time, the author also used a lot of pen and ink to describe many wrong cases, and some ideas were far-fetched but repeatedly mentioned, which was too lengthy.

Although some of these lengthy pen and ink describe Kiyoshi Mitarai, Ishioka and his own personality, and pay tribute to various mystery novels through the protagonist's mouth, there is still a sense of verbosity, and the reading experience is not very good.

Generally speaking, the biggest highlight of the book is the modus operandi. On the whole, it is really worth reading. However, due to the large number of words in the full text, there is some procrastination in the middle, which requires patience!