Inkspot Fancy

Going to sporting events in the Detective Conan universe is dangerous.

In this book, after a thoroughly absurd deduction competition that shows just how much Heiji doesn’t deserve Kazuha, the five of them -- Heiji and Kazuha, Conan and Ran, and Mouri  -- join one of Heiji’s dad’s coworkers and friends at a baseball game. But as they’re watching the game, a cell phone gets dropped at their feet – a phone with a puzzle to solve. It’s the first of three, and if they can solve all three, they can stop a man from killing himself and taking the whole stadium with him.

If you followed the series, you might remember this isn’t the first time people have been threatened at a game. But then, by this point, you may find the details of every case seem a little familiar. There’s only so many ways and places to kill people and only so many uses for fishing line.

This is an incomplete story, finishing in the next volume, and usually I would choose that deduction contest as a favorite book for this volume, but unfortunately, that case is one of those that shares a certain necessary feature – it’s a mystery that someone like me, born and raised in the USA, just doesn’t understand enough culturally to even hazard a guess. Part of the fun to me is picking out the clues and trying to puzzle out the solution, even if I can’t actually put it all together correctly. But in cases like this (here you specifically need to know what characters might be on the opposite sides of children’s spelling blocks based on the faces you can see in a photograph) there’s just no way, which takes a little something away from the experience.

Still, good, fun volume.