Case Closed: Volume 28

Rated “T+” for “Older Teen”

After they accost him, two mysterious men in black administer a strange substance to ace high school detective, Jimmy Kudo, who was on their trail.  This strange substance physically transforms Jimmy into a first grader.  While searching for a cure, Jimmy takes on the identity of elementary school student, Conan Edogawa.  Acting alone and sometimes with his friends, the Junior Detective League, Jimmy/Conan keeps on solving criminal cases and mysteries.

Case Closed, Vol. 28 opens with Conan and the Junior Detective League wrapping up a murder case deep in the woods, while an angry mama bear silently stalks them.  Next, in the case of “The Deceitful Woman,” a woman looking for a school chum leads Conan and Richard Moore, “the sleeping detective,” right into a murder case.  Right after that case, they find Harley Hartwell, (the “other” greatest detective in Japan) and his lady, Kazuha, waiting for them – ready to take the entire gang to tiny Bikuni Island, where, of course, they find murder most foul.  This time, however, there is more than one corpse, and everyone must wonder, is it “The Mermaid’s Curse?”

It’s the same for the twenty-eighth volume of Case Closed as it is for the earlier volumes.  Readers get highly entertaining whodunits in the vein of the classical mystery story.  The strange twists of these murder plots sometimes stretch the stories’ credibility.  The clues are contained in the stories and are often hard to find, but creator Gosho Aoyama creates the kind of stories that will have the reader tearing through the pages to learn the killers’ identities.  The mysteries in this volume aren’t up to par compared to recent cases, but this volume of Case Closed is still a treat for anyone looking for whodunit-style detective comics.

B+