The Devotion of Suspect X, By Higashino Keigo 

Translated by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander

(2005, translated 2011)

Minotaur Books

(Detective Novel)

This is the third in Mr. Higashino’s series of crime novels featuring “Detective Galileo” the pet name of Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a physicist who consults with the Tokyo police forensics unit. Detective Kusanagi is investigating a murder in the Edogawa district. The body of a middle-aged man has been found by the concrete banks of a river, its face and hands mutilated. A stolen bicycle is found nearby, and the fingerprints on the bike match those of a missing person. Routine police work leads Detective Kusanagi to the dead man’s ex-wife. A series of interviews of the woman and her daughter turn up some interesting evidence; a surprisingly shaky alibi eventually turns out to be iron-clad, and the detectives can find no logical motive for the ex-wife to have acted in violence. The police at the station are of two camps: the woman is a dedicated single mom and too petite to have committed the crime, or she is part of a larger conspiracy to murder the deceased. A chance meeting at the crime scene with the ex-wife’s neighbor leads Detective Kusanagi to a fortuitous social discovery: the neighbor, a high school math teacher named Mr. Ishigami, is a graduate of the same college attended by both Detective Kusanagi and Dr. Manabu Yukawa. Indeed, Dr. Manabu Yukawa and Mr. Ishigami knew each other well. They were in the same class, and though Yukawa specialized in physics, he was interested enough in pure mathematics to have become one of the many students who revered Ishigami for the purity of his thinking and the tenacity of his spirit. The three meet socially and at one point Detective Kusanagi even considers asking Ishigami to assist the investigation by keeping an eye on his neighbor—a request both Ishigami and “Detective Galileo” object to as being unethical. The case is further complicated by the arrival of an old suitor of the ex-wife, someone who knew her back when she worked as a hostess in a bar. His resurfacing just weeks after the murder throws a wrench into the detective’s determination to untangle the truth behind the crime. This is a wonderfully rich and human mystery, as satisfying to the spirit as it is to our wish to challenge our wits with a complex puzzle. The Devotion of Suspect X is ranked number thirteen in the magazine Shukan Bunshun’s Top One-Hundred Japanese Mystery Novels of All Time.

“She had said everything there was to say, but she was sure she hadn’t seen the last of him. He would show up at the shop again before long. He would stalk her, become a nuisance, maybe even make a scene. He might even show up at Misato’s school. He would wait for Yasuko to give in, figuring that when she did, she would give him money.”