Black Butler: Book of Murder

On the Queen's orders a party is held at Phantomhive manor: journalists, doctors, a writer and a nobleman. The night is broken by a murder, and with snow closing the roads nobody can leave. Then a second body is found. Sebastian, Earl Ciel's butler, is lying there as one of the first victims, which puts the most capable person in the house out of action. One of the guests, the writer Arthur, takes on the investigation. The structure is a classic locked-room mystery and all the pleasure comes from that: a manor cut off by snow, a limited set of suspects and an amateur detective. The solution arrives, as the genre requires, in a long explanatory scene. Noriyuki Abe directed. It was made as a two-part special and adapts a story from the comic strand of the series directly. The series' familiar humour is here too, with Sebastian doing everything perfectly used this time as the thing that breaks the story open. Who it is for: viewers of Black Butler and anyone who likes locked-room plotting. Who it is not for: newcomers starting here. The characters' histories go unexplained, the solution runs long, and the number of suspects is confusing through the first half.