I feel like this author and I are just jamming together on the same vibe. I’ve seen other people’s reviews and YouTube reactions/book club live shows and my reactions are so different to theirs. I really feel like I just fall into this author’s worlds and just let him shamelessly manipulate me exactly the way he wants and it’s hard for me to imagine not being enthralled by what’s happening. They’re all like ‘meh,’ and I’m like what are you talking about?!???
This particular tome follows three threads, and it’s another case where Higashino tells you what happened in the very first chapter, who did the killing and why . . . and then still manages to create a suspenseful narrative, not only holding you on tenterhooks about whether or not the murderer will be caught, but how the cover-up was conducted, and introducing thorny personal relationships that impact the unraveling of the crime. This is like a four-part cat and mouse game where there is a cat (Detective Kusanagi), a mouse (the murderer—a woman named Yasuko who kills her ex-husband in self defense, and in defense of her daughter Misato, who also helps with the murder), another cat who is helping the mouse hide her crime (Ishigami, her next door neighbor), and then a third cat who can’t decide which cat he wants to win the game (Yokawa aka Detective Galileo, a physics professor who sometimes helps his friend Kusanagi solve crimes like a modern day Sherlock).
The ending about knocked me over, did not see it coming. Very much continue to recommend this author’s books, just know going in that it’s not a thriller, and it’s pretty cerebral. There are a lot of conversations, and it slowly builds up to the ending, so if a slow burn suspense novel isn’t your thing, this probably won’t be for you. But it’s so clever, I kind of think you should give it a try anyway.
