Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba

What would you do if you were given the power to cause someone’s death, simply by writing their name in a notebook. The first thought that would occur to most of you would probably be that you would not use the book, that doing so would be murder. And you would be right, of course, it is. But think about it for a moment. What if you were alive in the early 1940s? It’s becoming clear that something evil is occurring in Europe. You could write Adolph Hitler’s name in the book, and save the lives of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others that deemed undesirable by The Third Reich. Wouldn’t using the book be justified?
This is the dilemma that faces 17 year old Japanese high school student, Light Yagami. He comes to posses a death note, the notebook of a death god who becomes bored with his work, and drops it into the human world to see what will happen. Light thinks that the death note just a prank, but he soon becomes curious enough to try it. He chooses a man who has killed several innocent people, and is holding eight people hostage in a nursery school. He writes the man’s name in the death note. Forty seconds later the man dies of a heart attack. At first, Light is disturbed by the realization that he has killed someone, but it is not long before he decides that he will assume the responsibility of using the death note, and will decide who lives and dies.
Light deliberately uses his power in such a way that people will notice, in order to demonstrate to people who would do wrong that there is someone watching their misdeeds who will punish them. The authorities also notice the strange pattern of vigilante killings and begin an investigation to try to track down whoever it is that has decided to take justice into their own hands. It would seem to be impossible to uncover Light’s activities, but a secretive genius who goes only by the name L joins the investigation, and is confident that the person or person’s responsible for the killings will be revealed.