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* DarkerAndEdgier: Easily the darkest story in the ''Franchise/DeathNote'' franchise. Despite Mello's somewhat light-hearted tone in narrating the tale, BB's murders are disturbingly horrific, even by Death Note standards.
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* ManOnFire: Unusual in that it was [[spoiler:self-inflicted and the victim survived, but was horribly scarred.]]
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* TheStinger: The last line, which ties this back into canon: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday died in prison from a mysterious heart attack, which any Death Note fan will recognize as Light's work.]]
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* TheStinger: The last line, which ties this the story back into canon: [[spoiler:Beyond [[spoiler:"And a few years after his arrest, on January 21, 2004, serving a life sentence in a California prison, Beyond Birthday died in prison from of a mysterious heart attack, which any attack." Any Death Note fan will recognize this as Light's work.]]
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QQ also seems to be a legal name. Not as silly as Bluesharp Babysplit or Backyard Bottomslash, though.
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* AerithAndBob: Naomi and Raye are fairly normal names, Beyond Birthday appears to be self-chosen, and Rue Ryuzaki is an obvious pseudonym. But how do you explain Believe Bridesmaid, Bluesharp Babysplit, and Backyard Bottomslash?
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* AerithAndBob: Naomi and Raye are fairly normal names, Beyond Birthday appears to be self-chosen, and Rue Ryuzaki is an obvious pseudonym. But how do you explain Quarter Queen, Believe Bridesmaid, Bluesharp Babysplit, and Backyard Bottomslash?
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%% Image selected per Image Pickin' thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1560731694029508900
%% Please do not replace or remove without starting a new thread.
%%
[[quoteright:249:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/another_note.png]]
A SpinOff novel of the popular manga and anime series ''Manga/DeathNote'', written by Creator/NisioIsin, published in 2006.
''Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases'' follows FBIAgent Naomi Misora as she is enlisted by the GreatDetective L to help him solve a series of perplexing and brutal murders in UsefulNotes/LosAngeles, each with a Wara Ningyo (a Japanese straw doll) left at the crime. She is soon joined in her investigation by a mysterious "unprivate" detective called Ryuzaki.
----
!!''Another Note'' provides examples of the following tropes:
* ActionGirl: Naomi is an FBI agent and a skilled martial artist.
* AerithAndBob: Naomi and Raye are fairly normal names, Beyond Birthday appears to be self-chosen, and Rue Ryuzaki is an obvious pseudonym. But how do you explain Believe Bridesmaid, Bluesharp Babysplit, and Backyard Bottomslash?
* AlliterativeName: Rue Ryuzaki, Beyond Birthday, Believe Bridesmaid, Quarter Queen, Backyard Bottomslash, Bluesharp Babysplit, and Blackberry Brown.
* AloneWithThePsycho: Naomi with [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday. Technically, she's alone with Beyond Birthday for most of the novel]].
* BloodierAndGorier: While there are far fewer deaths here than in ''Manga/DeathNote'', the murders we do have are far more grisly.
* CallingCard: The Wara Ningyo straw dolls nailed to the walls at every crime scene but have one less appear each time.
* CaughtWithYourPantsDown: Sort of. Naomi walks in on BB rifling through Quarter Queen's underwear drawer, ostensibly as part of the investigation, but it looks to her like he's just being a pervert.
* CruelAndUnusualDeath: B's victims are battered and mauled in various ways, but he always renders them unconscious before killing them and performs the more elaborate mutilations after they're dead, suggesting that he chooses his methods for symbolic or aesthetic reasons rather than out of a desire to cause suffering.
%%* DeathByOriginStory: [[spoiler:A.]]
* DetectiveMole: [[spoiler: The private detective Ryuzaki, who assists Naomi in her investigation and who the audience naturally assumes must be L, is actually B himself. He steers Naomi to recognize the clues he wants L to see and plans to use their stakeout as a setup for his final "murder" of himself.]]
* {{Determinator}}: B is determined to defeat L, no matter what.
* DoomedByCanon: [[spoiler: With the exception of Near, everyone who appears or is mentioned in the story is dead by the end of the main series. Even TheNarrator, Mello.]]
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: Beyond Birthday. (It was part of his {{Thanatos Gambit}} though.) Also A, because he could not handle the pressure of being L's successor]].
* TheEndingChangesEverything: [[spoiler:Throughout the entire book, the reader thinks that Ryuzaki is L -- it's specifically set up that way. At the end it is revealed that "Ryuzaki" was actually Beyond Birthday the whole time.]]
* FameThroughInfamy: Beyond Birthday's entire goal is to surpass L. Not by becoming the world's greatest detective, but by becoming the world's greatest criminal.
* FirstPersonPeripheralNarrator: Mello. At first, it looks like this trope is in play because L and Naomi were dead in the manga by the time the book came out, but Mello uses his distance from the events to deliberately obscure the twist.
* ForegoneConclusion: Readers familiar with the main ''Death Note'' series, which realistically means almost all readers, will know that Naomi and L successfully solved the LABB murder case and that both of them were murdered during the Kira investigation within a couple of years. Within the novel itself, the audience is told up-front that the killer is a man named Beyond Birthday, although the fact that [[spoiler:he's the same person as Rue Ryuzaki]] is a surprise at the end.
* FunWithAcronyms: The narration notes this was invoked by [[spoiler:Beyond's choice of location for his crimes, which is what made this the L.A.B.B. murder cases. L's After Beyond Birthday.]]
* HarmfulToMinors: [[spoiler:Beyond's youngest victim is the thirteen year old Quarter Queen, with her being under-aged act as part of why she was murdered despite not following the other victim's naming convention.]]
* IdiotBall: All the murder victims have strange and unusual names. Anybody who learns what their names are would instantly conclude that for some reason, this killer only goes after people with weird names. Ryuzaki and Naomi never even consider this, though. In fact, they seem to be genuinely unaware that the names in question are unusual.
* IJustWantToBeYou: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday to L. An odd case in that he also resents how he was being seen as L's "backup" back in Wammy's house.]]
* IrritationIsTheSincerestFormOfFlattery: [[spoiler:Part of why the Ryuzaki switch is so effective: Beyond has gone out of his way to mimic L's appearance and mannerisms to the point when Naomi finally meets L in person she's taken aback by how similar but ''off'' Beyond was to him.]]
* LemonyNarrator: Mello, who names the killer in the first paragraph, before deciding that he can't keep up the narrative tone he started with and tells the story directly, and goes on to mock the reader when they fall for the twist he set up.
* LockedRoomMystery: [[DeconstructedTrope Deconstructed]] here, as it is pointed out that the killer simply having a spare key can solve the majority of cases. One of the first things Naomi notices is that a locked room is supposed to fool the investigators into thinking the death was a suicide, but the ways these three victims died (one strangled from behind and two killed by weapons not left at the scene) make it clear that they were murdered, thus begging the question of why the killer bothered with a locked room ''at all.'' It's not until she figures out the trick used to lock the room that she realizes the truth: [[spoiler: the killer didn't want to make three homicides look like suicides... he wanted to make a suicide look like it matched the homicides]].
* ManOnFire: Unusual in that it was [[spoiler:self-inflicted and the victim survived, but was horribly scarred.]]
* MurderSuicide: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday is his own final victim.]]
* NinjaPirateZombieRobot: B, who is [[spoiler:L's [[EvilTwin evil look-alike]] (however, it is revealed that this is not his actual appearance; B disguises himself by putting on heavy layers of makeup), a [[TheSociopath sociopathic]] EvilGenius [[{{Tykebomb}} Wammy's kid]] SerialKiller born with the [[{{Namedar}} Shinigami eyes]]]].
* NoodleIncident:
** Mello has heard the stories of how L bested Eraldo Coil and Denevue, and how L arrived at Wammy's House, but chooses not to share those stories.
** The circumstances around ''exactly'' how Mello got to meet L in person and hear these stories are unexplained.
** Just ''what'' happened to the second and third generations of would-be L-successors (after A and B, but before Mello and Near).
* PosthumousNarration: This might be the case with [[spoiler:Mello]] [[UnreliableNarrator according to the prologue]]. It's ''technically'' possible that [[spoiler:he composed this during the events of the manga, but it's hard to believe he'd have had the time, given the circumstances. On one hand he makes various references to people finding these "notes" and the act of writing this story, but he also makes overt references to having "lost," and talks about his own death in a very casual way that seems odd if he isn't speaking after the fact with benefits of knowing how the Kira case played out after he died.]]
%%* NoSocialSkills: L and B.
* {{Prequel}}: It expands on the Los Angeles BB case that L mentioned casually in the original ''Manga/DeathNote'' series.
* TheRival: L is this to B. (It's a bit one-sided though as [[UnknownRival L doesn't really return the sentiment]].)
* ShoutOut: ''Manga/AkazukinChaCha'', the favorite manga of Beyond Birthday, is a real manga and anime from the mid 1990s.
* StalkerWithACrush: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday]]'s actions and desire for said actions [[VillainousCrush can be seen as this towards L]].
* TheStinger: The last line, which ties this back into canon: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday died in prison from a mysterious heart attack, which any Death Note fan will recognize as Light's work.]]
* SuicideNotMurder: [[spoiler:Beyond planned to disguise his own suicide as the last of the sequence of four murders.]]
* SuspectExistenceFailure: [[spoiler:Well, that was the plan, anyway. Rue Ryuzaki, a.k.a. Beyond Birthday,]] plans to create a case that L can't solve by committing suicide and making it look like a murder. Up until this point [[spoiler: we're led to believe that it's L, not Beyond Birthday]] actually doing it.
* SweetTooth: Ryuzaki, much to Naomi's disgust given how he eats his jam and when she finds out exactly how much sugar he puts in tea. Or as she calls it "sweet dirt".
* TakeThatAudience: The reader is openly mocked when [[spoiler:we find out that Rue Ryuzaki isn't actually L, but a disguised B. The narration goes on to taunt the reader, stating, "The only people who knew that were L, who Misora herself had told, and the man who had assaulted her in the alley downtown--the killer... the idea that Ryuzaki ''was'' L was comically absurd and completely unthinkable."]]
* ThemeInitials: All of Beyond's victims share his initials, BB, except for [[spoiler:Quarter Queen, who's meant to parallel bb by being qq due to her young age]].
%% * TykeBomb: All the graduates of Wammy's House.
* UnreliableNarrator: [[spoiler:Mello's account of the story is third-hand, which he doesn't acknowledge to the reader because it would spoil the twist that Ryuzaki is Beyond Birthday, not L. This calls into question some of the details he provides about what Naomi or Beyond Birthday were thinking or doing, since for him to know, they had to tell L and L had to tell him. It's hard to say how much of what Mello relates is his own conjecture or even L's, but he is honest enough to say upfront that his bias is towards L and that he sympathizes with but doesn't intend to praise the killer beyond his due. He's also very respectful of Naomi, and does try to preserve her professional privacy until he no longer can.]]
* WellDoneSonGuy: [[spoiler:Beyond. He's doing this to get L's attention.]]
* WouldHurtAChild: Beyond Birthday, as proved by [[spoiler:his murder of a thirteen year old girl]].
%% Please do not replace or remove without starting a new thread.
%%
[[quoteright:249:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/another_note.png]]
A SpinOff novel of the popular manga and anime series ''Manga/DeathNote'', written by Creator/NisioIsin, published in 2006.
''Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases'' follows FBIAgent Naomi Misora as she is enlisted by the GreatDetective L to help him solve a series of perplexing and brutal murders in UsefulNotes/LosAngeles, each with a Wara Ningyo (a Japanese straw doll) left at the crime. She is soon joined in her investigation by a mysterious "unprivate" detective called Ryuzaki.
----
!!''Another Note'' provides examples of the following tropes:
* ActionGirl: Naomi is an FBI agent and a skilled martial artist.
* AerithAndBob: Naomi and Raye are fairly normal names, Beyond Birthday appears to be self-chosen, and Rue Ryuzaki is an obvious pseudonym. But how do you explain Believe Bridesmaid, Bluesharp Babysplit, and Backyard Bottomslash?
* AlliterativeName: Rue Ryuzaki, Beyond Birthday, Believe Bridesmaid, Quarter Queen, Backyard Bottomslash, Bluesharp Babysplit, and Blackberry Brown.
* AloneWithThePsycho: Naomi with [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday. Technically, she's alone with Beyond Birthday for most of the novel]].
* BloodierAndGorier: While there are far fewer deaths here than in ''Manga/DeathNote'', the murders we do have are far more grisly.
* CallingCard: The Wara Ningyo straw dolls nailed to the walls at every crime scene but have one less appear each time.
* CaughtWithYourPantsDown: Sort of. Naomi walks in on BB rifling through Quarter Queen's underwear drawer, ostensibly as part of the investigation, but it looks to her like he's just being a pervert.
* CruelAndUnusualDeath: B's victims are battered and mauled in various ways, but he always renders them unconscious before killing them and performs the more elaborate mutilations after they're dead, suggesting that he chooses his methods for symbolic or aesthetic reasons rather than out of a desire to cause suffering.
%%* DeathByOriginStory: [[spoiler:A.]]
* DetectiveMole: [[spoiler: The private detective Ryuzaki, who assists Naomi in her investigation and who the audience naturally assumes must be L, is actually B himself. He steers Naomi to recognize the clues he wants L to see and plans to use their stakeout as a setup for his final "murder" of himself.]]
* {{Determinator}}: B is determined to defeat L, no matter what.
* DoomedByCanon: [[spoiler: With the exception of Near, everyone who appears or is mentioned in the story is dead by the end of the main series. Even TheNarrator, Mello.]]
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: Beyond Birthday. (It was part of his {{Thanatos Gambit}} though.) Also A, because he could not handle the pressure of being L's successor]].
* TheEndingChangesEverything: [[spoiler:Throughout the entire book, the reader thinks that Ryuzaki is L -- it's specifically set up that way. At the end it is revealed that "Ryuzaki" was actually Beyond Birthday the whole time.]]
* FameThroughInfamy: Beyond Birthday's entire goal is to surpass L. Not by becoming the world's greatest detective, but by becoming the world's greatest criminal.
* FirstPersonPeripheralNarrator: Mello. At first, it looks like this trope is in play because L and Naomi were dead in the manga by the time the book came out, but Mello uses his distance from the events to deliberately obscure the twist.
* ForegoneConclusion: Readers familiar with the main ''Death Note'' series, which realistically means almost all readers, will know that Naomi and L successfully solved the LABB murder case and that both of them were murdered during the Kira investigation within a couple of years. Within the novel itself, the audience is told up-front that the killer is a man named Beyond Birthday, although the fact that [[spoiler:he's the same person as Rue Ryuzaki]] is a surprise at the end.
* FunWithAcronyms: The narration notes this was invoked by [[spoiler:Beyond's choice of location for his crimes, which is what made this the L.A.B.B. murder cases. L's After Beyond Birthday.]]
* HarmfulToMinors: [[spoiler:Beyond's youngest victim is the thirteen year old Quarter Queen, with her being under-aged act as part of why she was murdered despite not following the other victim's naming convention.]]
* IdiotBall: All the murder victims have strange and unusual names. Anybody who learns what their names are would instantly conclude that for some reason, this killer only goes after people with weird names. Ryuzaki and Naomi never even consider this, though. In fact, they seem to be genuinely unaware that the names in question are unusual.
* IJustWantToBeYou: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday to L. An odd case in that he also resents how he was being seen as L's "backup" back in Wammy's house.]]
* IrritationIsTheSincerestFormOfFlattery: [[spoiler:Part of why the Ryuzaki switch is so effective: Beyond has gone out of his way to mimic L's appearance and mannerisms to the point when Naomi finally meets L in person she's taken aback by how similar but ''off'' Beyond was to him.]]
* LemonyNarrator: Mello, who names the killer in the first paragraph, before deciding that he can't keep up the narrative tone he started with and tells the story directly, and goes on to mock the reader when they fall for the twist he set up.
* LockedRoomMystery: [[DeconstructedTrope Deconstructed]] here, as it is pointed out that the killer simply having a spare key can solve the majority of cases. One of the first things Naomi notices is that a locked room is supposed to fool the investigators into thinking the death was a suicide, but the ways these three victims died (one strangled from behind and two killed by weapons not left at the scene) make it clear that they were murdered, thus begging the question of why the killer bothered with a locked room ''at all.'' It's not until she figures out the trick used to lock the room that she realizes the truth: [[spoiler: the killer didn't want to make three homicides look like suicides... he wanted to make a suicide look like it matched the homicides]].
* ManOnFire: Unusual in that it was [[spoiler:self-inflicted and the victim survived, but was horribly scarred.]]
* MurderSuicide: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday is his own final victim.]]
* NinjaPirateZombieRobot: B, who is [[spoiler:L's [[EvilTwin evil look-alike]] (however, it is revealed that this is not his actual appearance; B disguises himself by putting on heavy layers of makeup), a [[TheSociopath sociopathic]] EvilGenius [[{{Tykebomb}} Wammy's kid]] SerialKiller born with the [[{{Namedar}} Shinigami eyes]]]].
* NoodleIncident:
** Mello has heard the stories of how L bested Eraldo Coil and Denevue, and how L arrived at Wammy's House, but chooses not to share those stories.
** The circumstances around ''exactly'' how Mello got to meet L in person and hear these stories are unexplained.
** Just ''what'' happened to the second and third generations of would-be L-successors (after A and B, but before Mello and Near).
* PosthumousNarration: This might be the case with [[spoiler:Mello]] [[UnreliableNarrator according to the prologue]]. It's ''technically'' possible that [[spoiler:he composed this during the events of the manga, but it's hard to believe he'd have had the time, given the circumstances. On one hand he makes various references to people finding these "notes" and the act of writing this story, but he also makes overt references to having "lost," and talks about his own death in a very casual way that seems odd if he isn't speaking after the fact with benefits of knowing how the Kira case played out after he died.]]
%%* NoSocialSkills: L and B.
* {{Prequel}}: It expands on the Los Angeles BB case that L mentioned casually in the original ''Manga/DeathNote'' series.
* TheRival: L is this to B. (It's a bit one-sided though as [[UnknownRival L doesn't really return the sentiment]].)
* ShoutOut: ''Manga/AkazukinChaCha'', the favorite manga of Beyond Birthday, is a real manga and anime from the mid 1990s.
* StalkerWithACrush: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday]]'s actions and desire for said actions [[VillainousCrush can be seen as this towards L]].
* TheStinger: The last line, which ties this back into canon: [[spoiler:Beyond Birthday died in prison from a mysterious heart attack, which any Death Note fan will recognize as Light's work.]]
* SuicideNotMurder: [[spoiler:Beyond planned to disguise his own suicide as the last of the sequence of four murders.]]
* SuspectExistenceFailure: [[spoiler:Well, that was the plan, anyway. Rue Ryuzaki, a.k.a. Beyond Birthday,]] plans to create a case that L can't solve by committing suicide and making it look like a murder. Up until this point [[spoiler: we're led to believe that it's L, not Beyond Birthday]] actually doing it.
* SweetTooth: Ryuzaki, much to Naomi's disgust given how he eats his jam and when she finds out exactly how much sugar he puts in tea. Or as she calls it "sweet dirt".
* TakeThatAudience: The reader is openly mocked when [[spoiler:we find out that Rue Ryuzaki isn't actually L, but a disguised B. The narration goes on to taunt the reader, stating, "The only people who knew that were L, who Misora herself had told, and the man who had assaulted her in the alley downtown--the killer... the idea that Ryuzaki ''was'' L was comically absurd and completely unthinkable."]]
* ThemeInitials: All of Beyond's victims share his initials, BB, except for [[spoiler:Quarter Queen, who's meant to parallel bb by being qq due to her young age]].
%% * TykeBomb: All the graduates of Wammy's House.
* UnreliableNarrator: [[spoiler:Mello's account of the story is third-hand, which he doesn't acknowledge to the reader because it would spoil the twist that Ryuzaki is Beyond Birthday, not L. This calls into question some of the details he provides about what Naomi or Beyond Birthday were thinking or doing, since for him to know, they had to tell L and L had to tell him. It's hard to say how much of what Mello relates is his own conjecture or even L's, but he is honest enough to say upfront that his bias is towards L and that he sympathizes with but doesn't intend to praise the killer beyond his due. He's also very respectful of Naomi, and does try to preserve her professional privacy until he no longer can.]]
* WellDoneSonGuy: [[spoiler:Beyond. He's doing this to get L's attention.]]
* WouldHurtAChild: Beyond Birthday, as proved by [[spoiler:his murder of a thirteen year old girl]].
