As a reminder, we are following the below schedule (page counts may vary based on your medium):
Week 1: Misc + 1.1, 1.2 (29 pages)
Week 2: 1.3, 1.4 (26 pages)
Week 3: 1.5, 1.6 (40 pages)
Week 4: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 (43 pages)
Week 5: 2.4, 2.5 (32 pages)
Week 6: 3.1, 3.2, 3.3(34 pages) Week 7: 3.4, 3.5 (37 pages)
Week 8: 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 挑戦 (56 pages)
Week 9+10 (EXTENDED WEEK): 5.1 - end (78 pages)
I will generally copy this information over thread to thread each week for ease of finding - you can always expect the schedule at the top of any weekly thread
Law and Order
Any reveals, for the current chapters must be behind spoilers or detail curtains. When we get further in you don’t need to hide details that were revealed in previous chapters.
Questions on vocab, grammar, nuance, and the like are both welcome and encouraged. If you’re not sure if it’s a spoiler, assume it is and use one of the above options to hide the text.
You are encouraged to speculate and guess wildly
Be kind about other peoples’ wild guesses
Even if you don’t read the chapter(s) in time, you are still encouraged to post in the thread for that reading once you have finished it. I advise not reading ahead in the threads as you may see spoilers.
To gauge participation - a poll!
Are you reading week 7?
Yes, I’m planning to read along/am reading along this week
I’m reading, but not at the same pace as the club
I had no intentions of reading the book, but I desire to click a poll
Okey-dokey, finished this week. I’m going to hopefully start/finish next week’s as well since I’ll be on vacation all next week, and I don’t want to have to worry about my book club reading then.
I feel like despite this being a logic puzzle I haven’t been inspired to guess at whodunit. It’s weird as 異世界の名探偵, which I just finished, was the exact same style of mystery and even included a 挑戦 as well. I think the difference is that there was a fairly limited set of suspects and the focus was on the how, whereas here the pool of suspects feels like it just keeps getting bigger.
I don’t have any logic based theories yet. There’s still too many people without alibis. I have a couple people I suspect on motive, but for all I know this is the type where the motive will come out of the blue.
It’s the structure of the book, I believe. It feels to me that the author wanted to make it a full-length book but wasn’t sure how, and instead of developing the characters he just spent a lot of time revealing information very very slowly. Not a spoiler, but hiding it in case you want to know nothing at all about how it proceeds: Vital information is still missing, and will be revealed in the next chapter.
I thought this would basically be school life that has a murder occur, but turns out it’s more a murder that just happens to take place in a school. Not that it’s bad, just a bit different than what I thought. It’s very focused on the crime–the entire first third was just the police’s initial investigation, and now this middle third has just been investigating alibis, and with such a laser focus on info-gathering it seems everything is getting wrapped up in 3 in-story days?
At least now we know Sanjou is definitely innocent I’ve had a bad feeling about Masaki since they first appeared, we’ll see how accurate my gut ends up being.
While it feels logic puzzly, it also hasn’t really felt like we’ve had enough evidence to really try to put things forward. I guess Aosaki is trying to hold cards close to his chest until the 挑戦. There’s just so many random things in the crime besides the locked room (the umbrella, the ribbon/poster, the girl Sagawa saw) that don’t seem connected to anything else (and thus are difficult to work into reasoning) but clearly will be related to the final solution somehow.
…And yeah, at this point basically confirmed that the “defend Sagawa” thing was just a hook for the first part, and not actually a core part of the book.
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Law and Order 
I’ve had a bad feeling about 