Mayu has just moved back to her hometown to plan her wedding when tragedy strikes. Her father is murdered. Her uncle, Takeshi, a former Las Vegas marquee magician, impulsively decides that he'll catch the culprit himself. Who needs the police? When Mayu's former classmates emerge as the prime suspects, it takes a conjurer's dazzling sleight of hand to unravel this teasing pandemic-period puzzle.

Who's next? The murderer holds the high cards, always one step ahead. But who better to unpack this twisty, turny mystery than a master illusionist? Mayu's naive eyes are about to be opened wide—as she hurtles headlong into a nightmarish narrative with a shocking conclusion!

The Dark Magician: Murder In A Town With No Name has a story by Keigo Higashino. English translation is done by Alexander O. Smith. Published by Viz Media (November 10, 2026).

Erica Friedman
Rating:

I'm going to begin with the ending of Keigo Higashino's The Dark Magician: Murder In A Town With No Name, because it is endemic of the kind of story this book is trying to be — both the killer and the motive were incredibly obvious. To hide these obvious facts, we are presented with multiple sleights of hand, but like a failed stage magician, the eponymous character's tricks are too clumsy to hide the facts.

So instead of getting a slick locked-door mystery, with a small cast, and a series of deftly turned tricks to uncover a lost truth, we are instead presented with a grouchy and insulting detective, complaining that everyone around him is slow while I waited nearly 300 pages to crawl by, only to learn that the obvious answer…was obvious.

I am an old-school mystery fan, with many re-reads of Christie, Doyle, Parker and the like long before I ever picked up a manga. My only rule for a mystery is that I should not be smarter than the supposed smartest person in the book. Unfortunately, Mayu's uncle, supposedly so clever that he can insult the intelligence of everyone in the book—a relic of post-Sherlock writing that I have come to loathe—while slow-walking a solution that was apparent with the literal first mention of the criminal's name, was just too frustrating to enjoy.

On the good side, the characters here all feel like real people. Even their childhood nicknames work in a way that doesn't feel small or too mean. This town with no name represents a lot of small towns in Japan, finding their business shutting down as COVID-19 closed off tourism and even homecoming. It makes for a sad, grey little place that is desperate to lift itself.

I'm all for small town tragedies and stories where the key was buried in the past. But for the best detective writer in Japan, I expected a lot more than this. A clear case, where I wanted to pluck protagonist Mayu out of this book and into something fun and interesting.