As they say in the musical Gypsy, you've gotta have a gimmick. That feels particularly true for the mystery genre, where authors have been trying to outdo each other with quirky detectives since Hercule Poirot and his magnificent moustaches entered the scene in 1920's The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Over the years, fiction (manga and otherwise) has given us a wide variety of unusual sleuths, and the well doesn't seem to be dry yet. But you could be forgiven for wondering just how much water is left as creators like teniwoha give us private detectives who are functionally immortal.

It's the “functionally” that's important here. Sakuya Outsuki and his father are both private eyes with an unusual gift: they can come back to life after they've been killed. But unlike traditional zombies or immortals, they return to full life – and are actually dead in the interim. For high schooler Sakuya, the most important piece of this is that last part, because unlike other immortal beings in fiction, his deaths are genuinely traumatic. He feels it each time he's stabbed or his throat is cut; he remembers each bullet to the head or heart. It's not the coming-back-to-life that's important to him; it's the fact that every death brings new emotional scarring that he can't ever forget. And while his father seems perfectly happy to continue taking on dangerous cases, Sakuya would rather live a normal, safe life.

We don't know what makes it so imperative that he work at his father's detective agency, but given his age, it's fully possible that he just can't say no to his dad. While Outsuki Senior takes on dangerous cases – this volume is bookended by his work on an airplane hijacking – Sakuya tries to stick to cheating spouses and other similarly low-danger work. That's what he thinks he's doing when he ends up on a luxury ocean liner: investigating a cheating film director. But of course, things can't be that easy for him, and he winds up first dead, and then solving the mystery of who murdered the scion of a manufacturing family.

Probably the best thing about this volume is that it wraps up the case. While there are cliffhangers about the hijacking, the cruise plot is fully solved. There's a real attempt to make it a fair play mystery, possibly to the tune of anglicizing a major clue, which relies on the English letters “M” and “W;” the trick also works decently well with the katakana characters for “ma” and “wa.” (This is just a theory; however, I'm not sure which the original uses.) A concurrent minor mystery involving a lost cat plays into the main mystery in a way that makes sense, and if Sakuya doesn't quite come off looking like one of fiction's great detectives, I think that's on purpose – he himself doesn't entirely believe in his skill, nor does he enjoy his work enough to care.

While Sakuya is a perfectly fine character himself – his mental health concerns are more than valid – his supporting cast is far less engaging. Lilithea, his age-mate assistant, errs on the side of “too quirky for her own good.” Although she probably cares for him (and he certainly cares for her), her demeanor is irritatingly robotic for no apparent reason, and her treatment of Sakuya often feels unnecessarily mean. Yuriu, a young actress involved with the cat case, is basically the boobs of the operation, portrayed as ditzy and perhaps a bit worshipful of Sakuya. Both of them drag the story down in different ways, particularly Lilithea. The art fares better, and it balances its panels well so that pages never feel claustrophobic, despite the consistent use of many small panels per page; grey, black, and white spaces are similarly well-balanced. Things get a bit confusing at the very end, as it isn't clear which Outsuki we're seeing in a crispy state, but that may be on purpose.

Killed Again, Mr. Detective? isn't quite as good as it ought to be. Despite a lot of elements that are solid, it somehow feels less effective than it should, like it thinks it's cleverer than it is. It's still a decent book, and I'm curious to read where it's going, but if you compare it to mysteries like Lost Lad London or The Kindaichi Case Files, it comes up short. It's probably more of a library read than a book I'd suggest running out to buy.