I really just read this to understand the BB memes and references to be honest. I appreciated how feral Ryuzaki was in this.

His body language reminded her of Pooh Bear, but Ryuzaki was neither yellow nor adorable, and less a bear inclined to doing nothing than a rather tall man with a pronounced slouch. When he had eaten four handfuls of jam, he proceeded to put his lips directly on the rim of the jar like it was a cup of tea and slurp the contents noisily. Within moments he had consumed the entire jar.
"Sorry for the delay."
"Oh... not at all."

This whole scene made me cry laughing, why are you like this?

A couple comments in the book made me uncomfortable, and I don’t like how misogynistic this franchise seems to get

If you like Death Note you'll enjoy this too. The puzzles were puzzling for sure! Made my head spin a few times but it was enjoyable, fun. Even made me laugh a few times, surprisingly. I really felt drawn to all the characters, even the murderer. And I'm SUPER glad Naomi was the protagonist. Ever since I saw her in the manga I needed more :(

With her investigative abilities, Naomi should have been able to eventually figure out that L was L based on him referring to himself as Ryuzaki in the end. It seems like she has no clue who L is in the manga, so this may have led her to surviving Kira. She would’ve been able to get in touch with L quicker with the clues she’d gathered. Because that would’ve changed the the story of Death Note dramatically, I think L introducing himself as Ryuzaki to her at the end should’ve been left out.

However, this was such a great addition to the world of Death Note. I don’t remember seeing any mention of this case in the manga when I read it in 2015, but I noticed it when watching the anime just a month ago. This makes me wish Naomi stayed around longer in the show. She went down so unceremoniously by Kira that I didn’t want to believe it. I was waiting for her to come back from her walk to suicide for the remainder of the show and join L’s investigation team. It wouldn’t have worked because she’d figured out who Kira was, but let me dream!

Anyways, because I wanted more of Naomi’s character, I loved that she was the protagonist of this book. She was already vetted as a badass for discovering Kira in the manga, but this cements her badassery even more.

I also was thrown by the grotesque descriptions of the murders, but I thought it added a lot to this world and definitely fit the dark themes. It would’ve made the anime that much more gritty to include the gore described in this book.

And how it wrapped up was so beautiful! B was foolishly obsessed, but the breakdown of how everything went down with more context was so good. I only could guess that Rue R was Beyond Birthday as Naomi’s revelation started coming to her. I almost thought L was trying to get rid of her while she sat in room 1313. Shows you how far off I was.

The writing for the manga is some of the best I’ve ever experienced, and I’m happy to say that NISIO ISIN met my expectations of intricacy in his writing too.

Honestly, I bought this book a LONG time ago (I’m talking around 2014) when I was really into manga and I loved Death Note to an obsessive extent.

That said, I didn’t think I would love this book as much as I did. It felt as if you were directly solving the case with Misora. I really liked the whole physical format of the book (I have the Spanish Edition from Norma Editorial) and it really suits the overall vibe of the story.

Only reason why I’m not rating this 5 stars is because of the kinda boring way they use to narrate the story (I’m partially attributing this to Norma’s awful translations). Although, I must say that this sounds a lot like Mello.

Read this, you’ll love it or hate it; there’s no in-between.