The Labyrinth House Murders, the third title in Yukito Ayatsuji's Bizarre House Mysteries series, translated from the Japanese by Ho-Ling Wong, is a high-concept, high-payoff brain buster that could have inspired the phrase "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
Eight guests have been invited to an overnight birthday party for mystery writer Miyagaki Yōtarō at his famous labyrinthine mansion outside Tokyo. Once assembled, the guests are informed by Yōtarō's secretary that their host has killed himself. Yōtarō has left behind an audio recording laying out his wish that the four mystery writers who are present compete to inherit his estate by participating in a writing contest judged by the nonwriters in attendance. Yōtarō's rules: each writer's story must be a murder mystery set at the Labyrinth House, and "every author must be the victim in their own story." But this isn't just the plot of The Labyrinth House Murders. It's also the plot of a published mystery that, in the novel's prologue, is delivered to the home of a man named Shimada for a reason later disclosed.
Not long after the writers have retreated to their rooms, one of them ends up dead. Who is the killer? In the spirit of the fair-play mystery--Ayatsuji's specialty--the answer is hiding in plain sight. Originally published in 1988, The Labyrinth House Murders is a superb locked-house mystery whose intellectual rigors are offset by some gentle ribbing. Among the party guests, the lesser brains seem to be an editor and a critic. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer