Our Shattered World

きみとぼくの壊れた世界

*by NisiOisin
*published by Kodansha Novels

Half 'puzzler' mystery, half soap opera -- therefore half successful.
I loath 'puzzler' or 'honkaku' mysteries. Endless tricks and alibis, the detective explaining his deductions endlessly...boring as shit. My eyes were glazing over in many places. The cover character, Byoinzaka Kuroneko, is so terrified of other humans she is unable to attend classes, and spends each day in the school nurse's office. Even at the best of times she has a tendency to talk too damn much -- many, many times while reading this I was yelling for her to get to the point.
The rest of the book is fun, but in a horrifying way, given the main character's increasingly incestuous relationship with his sister. His own innate denial of self leads to him acting entirely in her interests and those of his friends, which ends up causing a murder. Unless Byoinzaka manipulated the whole thing from her sickbed. The side of the book works quite well, but it does largely depend on your mindset -- I happen to be the sort of reader who ploughs on with horrified fascination when a writer starts flaunting taboos, but if that isn't you, you probably stopped reading when I mentioned incest in the first place.