Fear looms over the luxurious Furugami estate. The beautiful, young Yachiyo Furugami, plagued by episodes of sleepwalking, receives a series of cryptic letters culminating in an ominous warning: 'Walk not at night'.Then a body is discovered, decapitated with a centuries-old samurai sword. The police are baffled, so the famous sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi is called upon to solve the mystery, but before he can do so, the killer strikes again. Can Kindaichi get to the truth before the Furugami family is destroyed by its own secrets?



Seishi Yokomizo (1902-81) was one of Japan's most famous and best-loved mystery writers. He was born in Kobe and spent his childhood reading detective stories, before beginning to write stories of his own, the first of which was published in 1921. He went on to become an extremely prolific and popular author, best known for his Kosuke Kindaichi series, which ran to 77 books, many of which were adapted for stage and television in Japan. The Honjin Murders, The Inugami Curse, The Village of Eight Graves, The Devil's Flute Murders, The Little Sparrow Murders, Death on Gokumon Island and Murder at the Black Cat Cafe are also available from Pushkin Vertigo.Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator working from Japanese into English. The recipient of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize, his translations include The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto and The Noh Mask Murder by Akimitsu Takagi (available from Pushkin Vertigo).



My book of the month, this is a brilliant novel at several levels, not least the translation by Jesse Kirkwood... An ingenious plot and a great read



PRAISE FOR SEISHI YOKOMIZO



Plenty of golden age ingredients... with a truly ingenious solution



Kosuke Kindaichi is sort of a Japanese Columbo... [This is] a locked-room murder mystery involving a samurai sword, a three-fingered man, and a wealthy family who really didn't accept their son's new bride



Readers will delight in the blind turns, red herrings and dubious alibis... Ingenious and compelling



At once familiar and tantalisingly strange... It's an absolute pleasure to see his work translated at last in these beautifully produced English editions



With a reputation in Japan to rival Agatha Christie's, the master of ingenious plotting is finally on the case for anglophone readers



An iconic slice of classic Japanese crime fiction



The premise alone is dazzling [and] the solution to this mystery came as a complete surprise - exactly what I asked for



A classic murder mystery... Comparisons with Holmes are justified, both in the character of Kindaichi and Yokomizo's approach to storytelling - mixing clues, red herrings and fascinating social insight before drawing back the curtain to reveal the truth



Yokomizo masterfully builds suspense with intricate puzzles, red herrings, and unexpected twists, keeping readers guessing until the final reveal... A must-read for a dose of classic detective fiction