By Daken and toi8. Released in Japan as “Dare ga Yuusha wo Koroshita ka” by Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Kim Morrissy.
It’s always hard to try to review a book whose very nature requires that the reader is surprised as it goes along. It’s even harder to do this when the book is excellent, as your review essentially amounts to “You’ve got to read this, it’s great!” “Why?” “I can’t tell you, spoilers!”. But here we are, and this book is great, so let’s settle down and try to do this. At its heart this book takes a long look at the fantasy standard “hero’s party goes to defeat the demon lord” cliche. There’s a prophecy, there’s the hero/swordsman/mage/healer party composition, there’s a promised reward of a royal daughter, and, inevitably, there’s a death. Because the book is called “Who Killed the Hero?”, I can at least talk about that. The death, in turn, leads the book and its cast to ask about the nature of the hero, why they have to defeat the demon lord when others cannot, and how a story can be turned on its ear by a simple investigation.
Four years earlier, the hero, Ares, led an elite team to defeat the demon lord. There was noble swordsman Leon, beautiful priestess Maria, and intelligent yet cynical mage Solon. They succeed… and yet, when they return, Ares did not come back with them, and they said that he perished on the return visit. Now someone is going around, getting the word on the street, talking to the other members of the hero’s party, as well as the prophet who made the prophecy about the hero in the first place, to try to figure out what happened. Because no one’s quite sure. Some say Ares was killed by a rogue demon. Some say the other members of the party killed him as there was a love triangle going on. And even the person who is going all around the capital trying to figure things out has their own agenda. What happened?
This is, by necessity, not a book with a large cast, and I enjoyed all the characters tremendously. My favorite was undoubtedly Maria, theoretically a girl devoted to God but in reality someone who will have a boy go and get her the “best” bread every day because it amuses her… only to be stunned when he actually manages to learn the things she was theoretically teaching him. I also was fond of the young princess, who listens to the hero say that he’ll defeat the demon lord, but he’s not coming back, and refuses to accept that. There are a lot of cynical people in this book, and it’s dealing, through almost its entirety, with a death. Despite that, I was amazed at how life-affirming and happy it is, and that once you get all the answers in the end even the one person whose life you assumed would end here ends up being forced into happiness.
There’s two more volumes of this, which seem to have a similar premise but a different cast. Similar to Brunhild the Dragonslayer, I think. In any case, despite not being able to give much away, this is a very rewarding book. Seek it out.
