If you go into nigozyu‘s light novel The Detective Is Already Dead looking for a mystery, you may find yourself disappointed. Although the book deals with some of the tropes and elements of the genre, it’s much less a mystery novel and more a mildly supernatural science fiction story that takes as its base the concept of detective and assistant duos in the Holmes and Watson vein. The basic premise is that Kimihiko, the Watson figure, lost his Holmes a year prior to the story’s opening, and now he’s somewhere between “grieving” and “at loose ends.”
The detective in question was Siesta, a girl roughly Kimihiko’s age when they meet at fourteen, who worked to counter a secret evil organization known as SPES. SPES, named after the Latin word for “hope,” claims to want to help humanity, but their tactics seem to contradict that; one of their major achievements in the novel…
