Malice

November 24, 2014
A nearly perfect example of the classic deduction-based mystery novel, Higashino’s artfully constructed tale begins with the murder of bestselling author Kunihiko Hidaka in a locked office of his locked home. His body is discovered by his wife, Rie, and his friend from boyhood, Osamu Nonoguchi. The latter narrates some of the novel, but most of it is taken from the notes of the police detective assigned to the case, Kyochiro Kaga, an investigator with Sherlock Holmes’s eye for detail and the patience and dogged determination of a bank auditor. He quickly settles on a prime suspect, whose confession is just the beginning of a unique, extremely clever cat-and-mouse game that continues to the book’s satisfying conclusion. Woodman, a theater and television actor (Cymbeline, Sex in the City), thankfully shies away from Japanese stereotypes. The main two voices both lack accents and suggest intelligence and formal education, but differ in subtle ways. As the sleuth confronts witnesses who are male, female, outgoing, subdued, friendly, and uncooperative, Woodman displays his impressive versatility. A Minotaur hardcover.

Starred review from August 4, 2014
Set in 1996, Higashino’s first Kyoichiro Kaga novel to be translated into English is as fiendishly clever as The Devotion of Suspect X (2011), the first in his Detective Galileo series. Kaga finds that he has a personal connection to a murder case. Popular novelist Kunihiko Hidaka was strangled in his home, in some unspecified part of Japan, not long after a visit from his old friend Osamu Nonoguchi, who was also Kaga’s colleague when the detective was a teacher. Nonoguchi, one of two potential suspects, has no obvious motive for committing the crime, unlike the other suspect, Miyako Fujio. A few years earlier, Hidaka wrote a successful novel featuring a nasty lead character, a thinly disguised version of Miyako’s brother, Masayo. Higashino offers one twist after another, all of which touch on the theme suggested by the book’s title. Readers will marvel at the artful way the plot builds to the solution of Hidaka’s murder.