God in a Locked Room

1st place in Japan’s main Top 10 Mysteries 2023 ranking.
From the writer who became No. 1 on this list for two years in a row—until then, no one had ever managed that.
Based on real events.

Here, every detail is read differently; strict deduction collides with a skillfully constructed illusion, and the line between truth and suggestion nearly disappears…

Ririko Arimori is a student with an astonishing, sometimes frightening, talent for logical inferences. She helps at the detective agency of Takashi Ootoya and often turns out to be stronger than her boss in investigations. And then Ririko vanishes without a trace. Ootoya is ready to do anything to get her back.

The trail leads him to South America—to the remote jungles of Guyana. There, for reasons known only to her, Ririko studies the closed religious community “Temple of the Peoples.” Something inexplicable is happening in the settlement: the followers are convinced that illness and death cannot strike them; a man without legs is sure he can walk; and the mysterious cult leader Jim Jordan demonstrates “miracles” again and again.

But even “miracles” are powerless in a place where death is considered impossible—because they find a dead person. This is a murder—and one that should not have happened: the room is locked from the inside, and the key lies next to the body. Ririko and Ootoya combine their deductive abilities to identify the killer. Jordan gives them just three hours. And no one can imagine what terrifying consequences this search will bring…

The novel has been translated from Japanese.

“Readers are in for an unusual story—a crime-mystification inside a real, existing sect, the ‘Temple of the Peoples’ from the 1970s: the characters are easy to recognize under slightly altered names, and the authenticity of what’s happening creates the feeling of a carefully assembled documentary chronicle. It offers an alternative perspective on a mass tragedy: relying on new information and changing the original conditions, the author pulls off an incredible con with barely touching the facts. Addictive, as a genuinely gripping conspiracy theory!” –