Death Note, vols. 1-3 (author Tsugumi Ohba / illustrator Takeshi Obata)

Death Note is the second manga series that I started at the recommendation of Sanada (the first was Saiyuki ... thank you thank you, Sanada-san!!!). She also warned me that Death Note wasn't likely to appeal to me the way that Samurai Deeper Kyo or Saiyuki had, and she was 100% right. The series is worth reading, but this is an affair of the head, not the heart.

Light Yagami, a high school student who is just finishing his final year, is academically brilliant, socially charming ... and bored by life and by his fellow human beings. One day he finds a mysterious notebook inscribed with instructions that will allow its owner to use it to kill people. Light assumes that this is some kind of joke, but he can't resist experimenting with the Death Note, using the names of a couple of criminals - who die, just as the instructions promised. Light quickly decides that he will make the world a better place by killing off criminals. But this is the 21st century, and his actions don't go unnoticed. Soon he's playing cat-and-mouse with the police and with a brilliant criminologist known only as L - but who's the cat, and who's the mouse?

( Read more ... with some spoilers )