Spoilers should always be hidden using spoiler blur.
When discussing a specific section, please mention where you are in the book, ideally by chapter so people reading different versions have a clear point of reference.
Feel free to read ahead if it’s exciting, but please refrain from spoiling ahead of the appropriate week.
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This is clearly the “here’s a summary, you should have everything you need to figure out the mystery” part of the book, so here’s my final prediction. I think that 正木 is the killer and has faked his own death by cutting off his own ring finger - the body in the incinerator was 古川. My guess is that there’s a secret passage or hidden room that has an exit in the tower room (related to the elevator??), and the housekeeper was killed because she accidentally saw 正木 coming out of it. Maybe that’s why 三田村 was killed too? Certainly 正木 had lived in the house for months, he had plenty of time to idly explore it and find any secret passages. And we now know he had a motive to want to fake his own death to get away from revenge coming after him for the money he’d previously stolen, as well as simply wanting to avoid being suspected of murdering 古川.
Things I still have no idea about:
the business with the “get out of this house” note
how 古川 got out of his room (I am not about to go back and reread that chapter while checking how much of the information still holds if you assume 正木 is a liar…)
what the relevance of the car accident and those past events is, and why 由里絵 is being kept here
(I don’t know why I didn’t consider the “practically unidentifiable body is not the person everybody thinks it is” idea earlier - it would have been a reasonable speculation right from the prologue, but somehow the author misdirected me away from thinking of it )
Agree, but I still think 由理絵 is in on all this. ‘I didn’t hear someone being brutally murdered while I showered’. Yeah, ok.
Maybe the note was from her, knowing there would be more killings? Maybe she does like the masked man, somehow? Their relationship is still puzzling.
With 正木 though, waiting a full year to kill people off again is certainly a long game.
Also two people dying in her room certainly does point to that being the ‘special’ room in some way or another.
I’m not finished with this weeks section yet, but the dying message is curious. When I think of a ring in this book I think of 正木. The most straightforward explanation for the message would be that he is the murderer (otherwise how would 三田村 know it was related? I doubt 古川 was the killer). So now I’m trying to remember if 正木’s corpse was identifiable, or if there is a possibility that he faked his death and it was 古川’s corpse.
Turns out I just had to read a couple more pages to get the answer to my question I agree with everyone, it sounds like 正木 is still alive. I really should have caught on to this sooner, what with a burnt body and the finger being the only identifiable part found.
I think 由里絵 helped him hide this past year. Maybe that one door was locked because 正木 hid there? I agree with there being something special about her room.
It took a while to get good, but now I’m excited for the ending.
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I agree with everyone, it sounds like 