Review of "The Devotion of Suspect X: A Detective Galileo Mystery" by Keigo Higashino

 

When Yasuko Hanaoka was a single mother to her little daughter Misato, she met and married Shinji Togashi - a luxury car salesman.



The family was happy and lived well until Shinji's employers discovered he was a thief and fired him. After that Yasuko took a job as a bar hostess....



.....and larcenous Shinji sat home, ate and drank, and took all his wife's earnings.



If Yasuko protested, Shinji beat her, and he also frightened his young step-daughter.



Eventually Yasuko managed to divorce Shinji, but he continued to harass her and ask for money. To get away from her ex-husband, Yasuko moved and took a job in a boxed lunch shop, hoping to ditch creepy Shinji for good.



However Shinji tracked his former wife down at the shop, made noises about getting back together, and made implicit threats about Misato - now a pretty teenager.



Yasuko is trying decide what to do about Shinji when he unexpectedly shows up at her apartment. Yasuko is upset, Misato is freaked out, and Shinji ends up dead on the floor.



As it happens Yasuko's next door neighbor Tetsuya Ishigami - a brilliant math teacher - has a crush on Yasuko. He's too shy to speak to her, but stops at the boxed lunch shop most days, to see her and order a meal.



Ishigami is home during the altercation between Shinji and Yasuko and her daughter, and he hears the hubbub leading to Shinji's death. Since Ishigami is secretly in love with Yasuko, he offers to help the ladies. They agree, and Ishigami does what he does.

When the homicide victim is found near a river, Detective Shunpei Kusanagi gets the case.



As usual Kusanagi consults his physicist friend Manabu Yukawa (aka Detective Galileo), a brainy fellow who's helped solve crimes in the past.



It so happens that physicist Yukawa and math professor Ishigami were at university together decades ago, and the physicist comes to suspect the mathematician had some hand in the crime. This leads to a 'battle of the brains', with Yukawa trying to discover what REALLY happened to victim Shenji, and Ishigami trying to preserve the cover up.

This is clever psychological thriller that will appeal to readers who like puzzles. I figured out a tiny bit of the plot, but got a big surprise at the climax.

Rating: 4 stars