The Kindaichi Case Files Volume 4- Smoke and Mirrors by Yazaburo Kanari and Fumiya Sato

Hajime Kindaichi has solved so many cases now that his fame has gone around the school. He is invited to join the School's Mystery Club by its President, Ruiko Sakuragi. She has it in mind to investigate the seven mysteries of the school surrounding the legend of The After School Magician.

Kindaichi is already a member of the Drama Club with his friend Miyuki Nanase, and the school rules say you can only belong to one club after school, but this is the first Kindaichi has heard of some of these school legends.

Of course, Ruiko isn't the only member of the club. The club also has a famous member named Makoto Makabe, who wrote a mystery book that is becoming a best seller. But there is also Tomoyo Takashima, a germophobe who is always wearing latex gloves and doesn't touch anyone, and Takahiro Onoue, a large, genial guy who nonetheless is the target of much of Makoto's spite ad Ryuta Saki, a guy who carries his camera everywhere he goes and films everyone.

Ruiko calls the meeting and hands out copies of the legends known around school, asking the other members to investigate them. But later that night, she calls up Kindaichi, having found the true story of the After School Magician. She asks him to meet her at the Clubhouse, which is the focus of many of the legends surrounding the AfterSchool Magician.

Kindaichi arrives, only to find the other members of the club gathering as well. They claim not to have been called by Ruika, but a strange male voice. There, they are confronted by Yuichiro Matoba, the Club's Advisor, who has been grading papers in his physics classroom, and the security man, Ryouzou Tachibana, who tells them it's against the rules for them to be in the school so late. But when Kindaichi and Tachibana go in search of Ruiko, they see a horrible sight: her body strung up in the supposedly locked Biology Classroom, hanging from a wire over a pentagram set with lit candles!

But when they run around the bend in the corridor to reach the room, the door is closed and locked, and when they break down the door, Ruiko's body is gone. There is no sign of the noose, pentagram or candles, and no sign that anyone has been in the room in a very long time. So what could have happened to Ruiko? Is she dead or alive? Did Kindaichi and Tachibana see the truth, or just an illusion?

Detective Kenmochi and the police arrive, and are going to ascribe the scene to a hallucination, until Kindaichi says that he saw the "vision" as well. But with nothing in the room, the police eventually call off the search and everyone goes home... until the next day, when the body of Ruiko reappears in the Biology room, this time for real. But how did her body disappear the night before, then reappear in the biology classroom?

As Kindaichi struggles with this, he and the police investigate the room and the building itself, which is to be torn down by the college. It seems that back during the war, a noted medical doctor named Dr. Jinbo was doing experiments to make soldiers heal faster. The authorities wanted his help, so several dozen wounded soldiers were given to him to help him in his experiments. But none of them were seen again. When the government men came to see what was happening, they found the soldiers slaughtered and chopped apart. Dr. Jinbo was trying to sew the uninjured limbs and body parts back together to create a super-soldier for the battlefield.

The maddened Dr. Jinbo was dragged away, but he promised to be back, and his spirit is supposedly The Afterschool Magician who murders people who get too close to his secrets. They also learn of a pharmaceutical company who once occupied the building, but for some reason they closed unexpectedly and donated the building to the school. But with the many and varied stories about the ghosts on Campus, which stories are true?

Kindaichi gets a clue when he realizes that the Mystery club used to be called the Mystery Stories club, and its president also wanted to investigate the ghost stories on Campus. But back then, there were only six stories, and her disappearance became the seventh. But then the members of the club start dying, and each one is found near an area spoken of in one of the school Ghost stories. Near, but not in the same place. Why? Doesn't the Afterschool Magician *know* where the stories are supposed to have taken place? Or could there be another reason?

But when Miyuki falls victim to the Afterschool Magician, Kindaichi nearly swears off solving mysteries, not wanting Miyuki's attack and injury to be his fault. But when Miyuki wants him to find the person who attacked her, Hajime Kindaichi swears upon his grandfather's name to bring her attacker to justice. But with so many false and misleading clues, does he have any hope of succeeding?

This case is as much about misdirection as murder, thus the name of the Case being "Smoke and Mirrors". Just as a magician misdirects your attention to pull off his magic tricks, the murders and the ghost stories told in the school are all there to distract attention from what is really going on.

The question is, can Kindaichi outwit the magician and see beyond the deceits he is using to mask his real reasons for the murders? This book is also a first in that Miyuki, who is so often menaced in these volumes actually gets badly hurt. But while Kindaichi can never say that he cares for her as more than a friend, her being hurt really pierces him through the heart, and he's ready to call off being a detective because his attempt to solve the case, and his pooh-poohing her feelings of being uneasy caused her to be hurt and dumped near a well that figures in one of the school ghost stories.

But it takes her recovery and her wanting him to find the person who attacked her to make him gird his loins and jump back into the case. And when he does, his determination to give Miyuki justice enables him to finally solve the case... and discover several things about the members of the Mystery Club that aren't apparent at first glance.

I really enjoyed this volume, and the mystery was both convoluted and spooky, with a sense of real danger that intensified when Miyuki is hurt and we don't know if she'll live or die. And at the end, we get to see a puzzle that features heavily in the story, and how it was adapted from the original Japanese solution to the puzzle, which is rather amazing. This volume, and this entire series, is highly recommended.