The Kindaichi Case Files Volume 7: The Santa Slayings by Yozaburo Kanari and Fumiya Sato

Kindaichi is in class when he is summoned to the phone in the Principal's office. There, he gets a call from Detective Tawarada, whom he last met in "The Mummy's Curse". He is asking for Kindaichi's help in a case in Hakodate. It seems that there is going to be a "Mystery Weekend" in a hotel up there, and someone called "The Red-Bearded Santa" has promised that there will be killings in the hotel.

Kindaichi agrees, and brings Miyuki with him as his "date", hoping that he can get closer to her during the weekend. But, spoiling his plans, Miyuki doesn't want to share a room with him, and Saki, a classmate from the "Smoke and Mirrors" case shows up wanting to help Kindaichi with his case. Tawarada is chafing under the leadership of Narumi Fuwa, his boss, who is handling all the details of the case, including where everyone is sleeping.

Kindaichi learns that the writer of the note, "The Red-Bearded Santa" is a suspected Drug dealer who "purchased" the room for ten years time almost exactly ten years ago. He wouldn't allow the room to be rented to anyone else, but people used to ask for the room next to his all the time. And as part of his strangeness, he had the entire room painted red. Incredibly enough, that room is where Kindaichi and Saki will be staying.

The theatre troupe is putting on a murder play called "The Narcissist's Evil Mirror", and Kindaichi gets to meet the troupe putting on the play. The chief of the troupe is a woman named Suzue Bandai, and she is an aging diva. With her comes Karen Fukuzima, a young actress who acts as her minder, and who plays minor parts in the theatre production.

There is a rumor that the play the troupe will be putting on this year is based on the people in the troupe itself, and no one would know better than the writer of the play, Yukio Nijikawa. But as soon as Suzue Bandai arrives, trouble begins. Someone sends her a present, a decapitated cat's head, and her dressing room is trashed. Shortly thereafter, during the introductory part of the play, Suzue Bandai is murdered by poison.

Karen, her minder, is devastated by the death of her idol, and begs Kindaichi to find the killer of her mentor. But as the murders pile up, Karen herself comes under suspicion for killing her mentor and being "The Red-Bearded Santa". And when Saki is killed after telling Kindaichi that he has an important clue, Kindaichi will have to put himself in danger to solve the mystery and beat out Ms. Fuwa, who thinks of him as useless compared to herself and has challenged Kindaichi to solve the case. But can he do it before anyone else is killed?

This is a great case, and is the longest of all the Kindaichi cases up to this point. It's also a much more complicated story, with Red Herrings flying thick and fast, until even the reader is hard-pressed to figure out whodunnit. Also unusual in this case is the identity of the murderer, which just goes to show readers not to be too accepting of who might be a murderer and who definitely won't be.

Though the main case takes place in a large hotel, the cast of characters is large and some of them are impressively creepy, without being guilty of murder. There's the Ventriloquist who seems to speak only through his doll, and the scar-faced actress who is able to hide her scar and become quite beautiful through makeup. She also turns out to be a lesbian, which would make many readers in Japan say she must be involved in the murder somehow (since Homosexuality is even more suspicious in Japan than in America), but the author resists giving readers such a simple solution.

The denoument of the mystery is truly epic, solving not only the mysteries at hand, but even those going back 10 years and 100 years and more. Readers will find a lot to puzzle over and even more to like in this series, which brings the strong mystery tradition of locked room mysteries to meet the popularity of Manga. It's definitely worth picking up and checking out.