I just had a look at the books on my mystery shelf for potential nominations and レベル7 (セブン) | L29 caught my eye - but at 665 pages it’s quite the commitment.
Did we agree on a max page count or something like that? I admit I only checked the OP.
And then I went and had a scroll through. 
The topics been brought up before. So nothing’s stopping me! 
(Unless, now that this first round has been completed, we want to add or change anything. Would also be totally fine. ^^)
If you’d like to officially nominate it you have only ~a day left. I’ll be opening the poll late this evening my time (so morning of October 10th for European timezones).
That one might be a good match for the WK Advanced Book club though. 
Yeah, I’ve thought about it. But with that club, I always have in the back of my mind the possibility of a shorter, more difficult book being chosen instead. The nominations are already skewed towards the longer, easier books. So I’d like to nominate it here for now - and if it gets dropped, I can still nominate it over there. 
Book: レベル7 (セブン) | L30??
Is there an ebook available?: No 
レベル7まで行ったら戻れない―。謎の言葉を残して失踪した女子高生。記憶を全て失って目覚めた若い男女の腕に浮かび上がった「Level7」の文字。少女の行方を探すカウンセラーと自分たちが何者なのかを調べる二人。二つの追跡行はやがて交錯し、思いもかけない凶悪な殺人事件へと導いていく。ツイストに次ぐツイスト、緊迫の四日間。気鋭のミステリー作家が放つ力作長編。
Once you get to level 7, you can’t go back. A high school girl disappeared, leaving behind mysterious words. The words “Level 7” appear on the arms of a young man and woman who wake up without all their memories. A counselor searches for the girl’s whereabouts and the two investigate who they are. The two pursuits eventually intersect, leading to an unexpected and heinous murder case. Twist after twist, four days of tension. A powerful full-length work by an up-and-coming mystery writer.
Translated with DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator (free version)
Not known
Why are you nominating this book: 宮部みゆき is a pretty prolific mystery writer - and I’ve been wanting to read something by her for a while. I acquired this one used and it’s been sitting on my shelf since. At 665 pages according to amazon (my paperbook version ends at page 768 
) it’s a bit intimidating though! Reading together with a book club could be a great motivating force to get through it, and finish it. And have a monster of a book on our resumees! 
Are you sure there’s an ebook? I can’t seem to find it.
Note: This nomination would take up the last slot in the upcoming poll. I have nominated enough books already, so please disregard it if someone else wants to nominate something in the few hours that remain until the poll opens.
Book: テロリストのパラソル | L30??
Is there an ebook available?: yes
ある土曜の朝、アル中のバーテン・島村は、新宿の公園で一日の最初のウイスキーを口にしていた。その時、公園に爆音が響き渡り、爆弾テロ事件が発生。死傷者五十人以上。島村は現場から逃げ出すが、指紋の付いたウイスキー瓶を残してしまう。テロの犠牲者の中には、二十二年も音信不通の大学時代の友人が含まれていた。島村は容疑者として追われながらも、事件の真相に迫ろうとする―。小説史上に燦然と輝く、唯一の乱歩賞&直木賞ダブル受賞作。
One Saturday morning, alcoholic bartender Shimamura had his first whiskey of the day in a park in Shinjuku. At that time, an explosion echoes through the park, and a terrorist bombing incident occurs. Over fifty casualties. Shimamura flees the scene, but he leaves behind a whiskey bottle with fingerprints on it. Among the victims of the terrorism was a college friend whom he had not heard from for twenty-two years. While being pursued as a suspect, Shimamura tries to get to the bottom of the case. The only work that has won both the Rampo Prize and the Naoki Prize, shining brilliantly in the history of novels. (automatic translation)
Terrorism and alcoholism, judging from the summary.
I was idly browsing the online bookstores and this caught my eye because it’s apparently the first book that has won both the Edogawa Ranpo Award (1995) and the Naoki Prize (1996). Reviews were generally good too, so I was intrigued. It is considered a hardboiled novel.
Ditto, I can only find options to be emailed a notification if an ebook becomes available 
I’ll note that an ebook version is not necessary to nominate, but it is likely to cut into the number of people who will vote for it as many people have a variety of reasons to stick exclusively or semi-exclusively to ebooks.
I have a pretty packed schedule through the end of the year @Belerith but if you want a informal 2023 book club the summary has me sold, and I’ve read two books by that author and enjoyed them.
As a note, unless you revoke your nomination I will keep it in the list for this evening.
Oh no, you’re right… I didn’t check on Amazon and simply went by the natively info. I edited the edition info on natively. 
Understandably so! It’s probably best to revoke it then, as you said. I try to avoid paying for shipping myself, so I wouldn’t want to put anyone into the position of having to decide between that and sitting out on a book club they’d rather join. (On the off chance it gets picked at all.) Should I delete the post containing the nomination?
I’d love to do an informal book club though! 
I’ll be looking forward to conquering the book with you and anyone else who may be in the mood.
No worries, I’ll just remember not to include it, haha. I’m about to go update the list to include the other nomination now.
Yay! I can see a few people joining - there are a handful of paperback lovers.
As a reminder, 
NOMINATIONS ARE HERE 
ebooks typically have previews (立ち読み) so if the book is unrated and you’re unsure, or you just want to scope out the writing style, please make use of it! Keep in mind that a good deal of books are entered at 30 by default and some of the books with only one or two ratings can have pretty unstable ratings.
As with last time, you will have 5 votes in this poll, and any books to receive no votes will go in the Nomination Graveyard 
They can be renominated, but please wait at least two voting cycles before reintroducing them.
As a quick reminder, the schedule is as follows:
) - first weekly thread for the chosen book is opened!Without further ado - the vote!
0 voters
The suspense here is killing me. We’re a vote away from a tie break or a brand new four-way tie 
Might end up having a run off vote
We had ten more voters in the previous poll. If even half of them eventually appear, the poll results may still change completely. 
I didn’t vote in the previous round, but there are some books I would like to read in there, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Aaaaand I made the problem worse.
I had had both 体育館の殺人 and アンデッドガール・マーダーファルス on my Amazon wishlist for a while and finally bought アンデッドガール・マーダーファルス the other day… Guess I chose the wrong one 
(I don’t like stocking up too much on one author at the same time)
アンデッドガール・マーダーファルス’s also been on sale recently, right? Seems like a reasonable decision to me.
I just saw a review for 体育館の殺人 and now I want to add my vote to that too, but can’t change it XD
If you click “show vote” it should let you adjust your voting choices, but the behavior is unintuitive
Ah ha! Thank you very much!!!
Poll is closed - and we have results!
The win goes to 体育館の殺人!
As a reminder, October 31st is when the first reading thread opens to give people time to get copies of the book and also to decide on a reading cadence. On that note, I took a look at the table of contents and this book will be a bit tricky to split up. I will outline that in the home thread.
Hello! I was invited by @omk3 from the WaniKani forums! I posted my introduction over there, but I’d still like to introduce myself here as well, and explain my relationship with the mystery genre! In addition to the below, I blog (poorly) about mystery stories over at Solving the Mystery of Murder. I like to think I’m fairly knowledgeable about classical English-language mystery novels from the early 20th century and (although less-so) their Japanese-language counterparts, but I also recognize I have a lot of gaps in my reading a lot to learn! I hope I can be a good and positive addition to the Mystery Novel Book Club!
While I grew up enjoying anime, manga, and Japanese video games, I never actually had an interest in studying Japanese. It wasn’t until I was about sixteen that I started to want to learn the language, when I discovered my life’s greatest passion: Golden Age mystery novels! Golden Age mysteries are a sub-genre as well as a movement in the history of detective fiction that marked a focus on mystery novels as “puzzles” or “games of wit played between author and reader”, in which the author gives the reader all of the information they need to solve, not guess, with 100% certainty the mystery, not only naming whodunit, but also how and why. However, while the genre of “fairplay”, “puzzle plot” mystery fiction died in the English-speaking world in the 1940s, the genre has continued to enjoyed popularity in Japan as 本格 and 新本格 (lit. “Orthodox” and “New Orthodox”) mystery fiction!
Because so few of these (shin-)honkaku detective stories are translated into English, I’m studying Japanese to further pursue my passion of reading Japanese detective stories. I also love to write my own mystery stories, and one day I would love to be able to write detective fiction in the Japanese language!
