Murder at the End of the World (2022) by Akane Araki

I previously reviewed Ross Montgomery's The Murder at World's End (2025), a classically-styled, retro-Golden Age mystery, which is set against the backdrop of the Great Comet Scare of 1910 when Halley's Comet was making its pass by the Earth – believing the planet would pass through its poisonous tail. However, the apocalypse never happened and Montgomery exploited the historical panic to stage a locked room murder inside a grand mansion that was turned into a vintage doomsday bunker. Coincidentally, just when I finished writing the review, the perfect supplement arrived in the mail.In July, Pushkin Vertigo released Akane Araki's Konoyo no hate no satsujin (Murder at the End of the World, 2022), translated by Jesse Kirkwood, which was awarded with the Edogawa Rampo Prize ("...Japan's most prestigious award for unpublished crime writers"). That award got her manuscript published. Araki's Murder at the End of the World is a completely different story from Montgomery's The Murder at…