Case Closed, Volume 42, Paperback/Gosho Aoyama

The mystery series that inspired the hit anime Reads R to L (Japanese Style), for audiences T+. Jimmy Kudo, the son of a world-renowned mystery writer, is a high school detective who has cracked the most baffling of cases. One day while on a date with his childhood friend Rachel Moore, Jimmy observes a pair of men in black involved in some shady business. The men capture Jimmy and give him a poisonous substance to rub out their witness. But instead of killing him, it turns him into a little kid Jimmy takes on the pseudonym Conan Edogawa and continues to solve all the difficult cases that come his way. All the while, he's looking for the men in black and the mysterious organization they're with in order to find a cure for his miniature malady. The Woman in Black In their most monstrous case yet, Conan and his friends dress up as famous monsters for a murder mystery game set on a creaky ghost ship. It's an evening of spooky fun--until a real murder interrupts the game. Then it's up to Jimmy Kudo to figure out which rubber mask hides the face of a killer But there's more than one monster on the loose. Faced with evidence that the Men in Black have discovered their real identities, Conan and Anita have only one hope: find the deadly assassin Vermouth before she finds them. Can they unmask the Syndicate's top mistress of disguise? About the Author: Gosho Aoyama made his debut in 1992 with Chotto Matte (Wait a Minute), which won Shogakukan's prestigious Shinjin Comic Taisho (Newcomer's Award for Comics) and launched his career as a critically acclaimed, top-selling manga artist. In addition to Detective Conan, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2001, Aoyama created the popular manga Yaiba, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1992. Aoyama's manga is greatly influenced by his boyhood love for mystery, adventure and baseball, and he has cited the tales of Arsene Lupin and Sherlock Holmes and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa as some of his childhood favorites.