The Devotion of Suspect X

Starred review from March 28, 2011
In this tightly plotted crime novel, Higashino pits a brilliant math teacher, Tetsuya Ishigami, against Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a shrewd physicist whose deductive prowess has earned him the nickname Detective Galileo. When Ishigami overhears his lovely neighbor, Yasuko Hanaoka, strangling her abusive ex-husband in the next apartment, he rushes to her aid. Smitten, he concocts a perfect, if complex, alibi for her. It's enough to mystify the investigating detective, but when Dr. Yukawa, the policeman's friend, begins his own sleuthing, and Yasuko falls in love with another man, both alibi and participants bend under the pressure. Even with its surprises and twists, the story unfolds in a manner more intellectually satisfying than emotionally gripping. But David Pittu's narration adds a humanity and passion to the proceedings, especially evident in the scenes in which Ishigami goes head to head with wily Dr. Yukawa. The former's calm manner of speaking seems to be concealing a feverishly working mind, while the doctor is evidently enjoying himself immensely. Pittu transforms those and other moments from mere wordplay into a thrilling game of cat and mouse in the Alfred Hitchcock tradition. A Minotaur hardcover.

Starred review from December 6, 2010
Higashino won Japan's Naoki Prize for Best Novel with this stunning thriller about miscarried human devotion, a bestseller in Japan. Pretty Tokyo divorcée Yasuko Hanaoka, secretly adored by her neighbor, lonely mathematician Ishigami, strangles her abusive ex-husband when he threatens her daughter, only to find herself suffocating in Ishigami's "perfect defense based on perfect logic," his plot to save her from arrest. As the police investigation proceeds, Ishigami's schoolmate, physicist Manabu Yukawa, plays chess with detective Kusanagi and elegant cat-and-mouse with Ishigami, while wealthy Mr. Kudo wins Yasuko's heart but, fatally, not her conscience. The characters' Japanese names can be confusing, but overall the author successfully combines unquestionable reasoning with unquenchable pain. In this brutally laconic translation, cold logic battles warm hearts throughout this elegant proof of the wages of sin, in which everyone suffers and no one can ever win.