Week 5: 点と線 [END]

Join the Natively Mystery Book Club here!

点と線 Home Thread

Week 5

Start Date: Sept 30th
Previous Part: Week 4

Reading:

Week Start Date Chapter Page Numbers Page Count
Week 5 Sept 30th 十二・十三 203-253 51

Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • When asking for help, please mention the chapter and page number. Also mention what version of the book you are reading.
  • Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun! :durtle:

Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll.
(Please feel free to update your status whenever you like!)

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I am no longer reading the book
0 voters
2 Likes

I actually liked the ending of this book!

This is where I say my now catch-phrase “I’m a bad person and I like bad endings”. Everyone dies is easily my favorite book ending :rofl: but really I liked how this book wrapped, but if you check my Natively review you’ll see I gave it a 2. This is because the lead up had me so frustrated for so long that even though I liked the ending, it didn’t redeem the book for me. My overall feeling when I look back is annoyance at the writing style, which is a bummer because the story I think has redeeming qualities. Maybe because it’s the author’s first work, and maybe because, as either an Amazon or Bookmeter reviewer put it, this is police fantasy, not police procedural.

I’ve gotta say I didn’t see how the wife was going to be involved, but I could sense she would be, somehow. I also thought the letters between the detectives were cute. It was a nice change of pace from the rest of the book and shows that perhaps if the author leans more into character writing in other books there’s a chance I’d vibe with it.

5 Likes

I honestly think the ending was quite a nice wrap-up in contrast to the more convoluted later half of the book. I think it’s a shame we couldn’t confront 安田さん and see his reaction instead it was more like “My wife is dying I’m probably about to get caught too so let’s go out together”, however I think the letter format was quite nice and thought 三原’s writing was more preferable to read than the other’s detective letter that had too much unnecessary 敬語 for my liking.

admittedly I couldn’t keep up that much at the end with how many unnecessary timetables (or at least it felt like that to me) there were so I just left all the calculating to 三原. That is where I think this book suffers the most in the fact that it mentions 50 different time points each down to the exact minute and expects you to keep track of all of them somehow (or not?)

I think the part that I liked the most was character interactions and the whatever pieces of psychology we could infer behind each character and their actions.

Overall it was quite fun but I probably wouldn’t recommend it to someone IRL so 3★ out of 5🙌

6 Likes

I liked the ending! Nice how everything falls into place at the end. No “deus ex machina” event that would probably have been disappointing for me. I had not expected his wife to go to Kyushu and actually murder someone there. I had “only” expected her to have helped in the background with planning the murder.

From me, 4★. Not my favourite, but a very decent book in my opinion. Glad we got to read it together!

What was a bit tiring for me was not that the book focused much on timetables as such, but just the simple fact that the numbers were almost all in Kanji. I had to translate them into numbers in my head every time. :smile:

And that there seemed to be a lot of expressions for numbers that are a bit vague like 三十五六 to express that someone is approximately 35 or 36 etc. I do not even remember how this is done in other novels, but it struck me as being very frequent and got on my nerves at times.

5 Likes