Search Results for: Yoshiki Tonogai

Secret Volume 3

Well, that was abrupt. I had no idea this “revenge among the student survivors of a bus crash” series only ran three volumes, making this the series conclusion. That keeps it moving quickly, though, as I had hoped. And it’s about time. We’ve found out who the three murderers promised to us in the first volume were. Now, the mystery is “why did their counselor sow dissension among them by giving them a week to confess?” One of the students […]

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Secret Volume 2

Secret volume 2 continues to be an improvement over Yoshiki Tonogai’s previous series, with more emphasis on character profiles and less on gratuitous murders. The deaths happened in the past, so now people are analyzing them — although there is the occasional attempted homicide, just to ramp up the suspense. We open with a profile of an accidental survivor. He stayed home sick from class on the day of the deadly bus trip, but he’s still severely affected by the […]

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Secret Volume 1

In a departure from previous series Doubt and Judge by Yoshiki Tonogai, Secret doesn’t have students locked in a booby-trapped warehouse and told to kill each other one by one. Instead, they’re in their classrooms, which makes the whole thing creepier, by keeping them in the setting of daily life. A small group of students have been in counseling because they were the only survivors of a bus crash that killed many of their classmates. On the last day of […]

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Judge Volume 6

The series by Yoshiki Tonogai about kids forced to murder each other concludes in this volume, and that’s pretty much all you need to know, that here’s where the story ends. I wrote about the first couple volumes of Judge, but I quit talking about — and paying attention to — the intervening books, because it was just about spinning out the suspense, which wasn’t very effective. I’m trying to recall if the three twists in this volume were foreshadowed […]

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Judge Volume 1

The author of Doubt, Yoshiki Tonogai, returns with another series about kids wearing animal heads trapped in a warehouse where they’re killed off one by one. However, Judge has more to recommend it than Doubt. (Although don’t get me wrong, that was quite the adrenaline ride, even if the end made little sense.) As you can see from the cover, there are different animals this time around. They’re themed, to match the seven deadly sins: the pig is gluttony, the […]

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Doubt Volume 2

I recommend reading this second and concluding volume close to finishing the first. If you don’t, you might have forgotten who’s who and who’s dead. (A “story so far” or character list page would have helped me a lot in recalling where we left off.) I can’t imagine what it would have been like to read this in monthly serialization. It doesn’t really matter, though, since there are a number of reversals. This isn’t a mystery you can figure out, […]

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Doubt Volume 1

Since I’ve been reading one “kill them off one by one” video-game-in-real-world title, I figured I’d try another. Doubt by Yoshiki Tonogai has the appeal of depending more on suspense, less on gory decadence. I’ve actually played a card game similar to the premise here, although in the manga, it’s done with cell phones for that modern touch. It’s called “Rabbit Doubt”. The setup is that there’s a group of “rabbits”, only one of them is secretly a wolf. The […]

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