Kojima finished reading William Hussey’s “Killing Jericho.” He said…

Kojima finished reading the advance proof of Chris Whitaker’s novel “All the Colors of the Dark.” He said Whitaker elevates mystery into literature and described the novel as a story that made him emotionally invested in its characters, kept him turning the pages despite not wanting it to end and feeling dread in its latter half, and ultimately bathes the reader in a “color of hope” beneath human darkness. He called it the best book he had read that year.

Kojima finished reading Eric Heisserer’s “Simultaneous” during the flight. He explained that the novel begins with reincarnation and past-life regression before becoming intertwined with a series of murders, and identified its distinctive concept of “simultaneous lives,” in which multiple people in the same generation share a single soul. He said the novel is driven less by its lore or world-building than by its cinematic, Nolan-esque narrative momentum, and also feels cinematic because the threat of an unknown serial killer is confronted by an investigator, a counselor, and an ordinary patient rather than by a vast government conspiracy or institution.

“With Horowitz and Hawthorne, nothing happens until halfway through the book. Usually, you have a dead body in the mix, but instead, you're made to read the development and relationship of these two characters for the longest time. That's the strength of a series.”

Kojima finished reading Thomas Knüwer’s “Das Haus in dem Gudelia stirbt” (“The House Where Gudelia Dies”). He described it as a German mystery about Gudelia, a lonely 81-year-old woman who narrates in the first person the sad past behind her attachment to a house, in a story moving between 2024, 1998, and 1984 whose present-day events unfold during a devastating flood. He said it is not the kind of mystery that begins with a dead body and proceeds through an investigation by a detective or police officer; he said that from around the middle it makes the reader reluctant to learn the answer to what happened and that, rather than being a whodunit, it goes deeper into both the human side of the story and the mystery itself. He recommended it.

“It's a mystery so I don't want to give too much away but when I read this I treated it as a work of literature.”