REVIEW: Doubt (vols. 1 and 2) - Yoshiki Tonogai

• Year first released:  2013
• ISBNs of the editions I read:  9780316245302 and 9780316245319
• Publisher of the editions I read: Yen Press
• My rating (out of 5):  4

Doubt begins normally enough: a group of high-schoolers who play an online game together - Rabbit Doubt - decide to meet up in-person for the first time. They have a good evening together shopping and eating and singing karaoke, and then suddenly wake up in a creepy, abandoned warehouse with bar code tattoos, the corpse of one of them hanging from the rafters, and the idea that they have to kill one other to flush out the murderer. 

I guess I should say: Doubt begins normally enough...if you're a Saw movie or an Agatha Christie novel.

I loved the premise. It's not really a spoiler to say that, of course, each of the kids has his (or her) own secrets he's hiding which sure makes him seem to be the guilty one. These secrets and red herrings roll out over the course of the books - as the corpses quickly stack up - until the person behind the game is finally revealed. 

There's a very Agatha-Christie-like conceit to the entire set up (think especially of And Then There Were None) which Tonogai pulls off brilliantly, and without making it feel as though he's simply rehashing the ground she started nearly 80 years ago.

The art, too (which Tonogai himself does) is fantastic. He moves deftly between scenes of warmth and humanity, and scenes of shocking violence (and/or the aftereffects of it). Doubt certainly isn't for the faint of heart, though it never comes close to crossing into grind territory - this is definitely a thriller, through and through, with nothing gratuitous or supernatural in play. There is plenty of violence and gore throughout, but it is always meaningful to the story as a whole.

The premise (of high-schoolers being trapped together in an abandoned building to play a twisted, murdery game) worked so well in Doubt that Tonogai repeated it almost exactly for his two other series, Judge and Secret. To his credit, he was careful to fill each series with a different host of secrets and clues, and even a different approach to who the game-maker is behind each. If you like any one of the three series, there's simply no way you won't like the other two. 

That said, though you're certain to like all three series, there's no getting around the fact that they all feel highly correlated, for better or worse. The twists and secrets are unique to each series, but the overall type of twists and secrets remains largely unchanged between the three (except, importantly, for who the ultimate villain is behind each - having read one won't give you any sort of clues or logical patterns that you can use to guess who the villain is in either of the other two).

Also, in reading just any one of them all of the characters look and feel distinct. When you begin in on another of the series, though, you'll quickly realize that these are basically the same personalities and quirks, just re-skinned and renamed for the next story. It's not so bad if you allow a gap between reading each of the three series, but a haze settles over them if you read them too closely together. 

It's an interesting idea, though: this recycling of personalities feels like a misstep on Tonogai's part - and yet, if I'm only reviewing one of the series for you (which, technically, I am), it's not as though it affects this one series on its own. This isn't a problem you will notice by only reading Doubt (or only Judge, or only Secret). I suppose, then, it's more of a warning for you if you decide to keep up with Tonogai beyond just this one series, rather than something I can fairly hold against just this one series.

These small inconsistencies (actually, ironically, I suppose I should say these small consistencies) don't keep Doubt from being what it attempts to be, though: a fun, solid, intricate thriller full of twists and personality, with interesting plotting and a clever ending. It has everything you could want from a manga thriller - and, I would venture, would be a good starting-off point if you're into thrillers but haven't yet approached the wonderful world of reading manga.

(Note: If these books sound familiar, I’ve actually already mentioned them once before - along with Judge and Secret - in my list of books to read if you’ve played certain games. Specifically, I mentioned that these books are great to read if you've played any of the three games in the Nonary Games series: 999, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, and/or The Zero Time Dilemma.)