Malice: a Mystery

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.

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.

September 15, 2014
The creator of Detective Galileo (Salvation of a Saint, 2012, etc.) returns with another fiendishly clever Chinese-make that Japanese-box of a whydunit. Kunihiko Hidaka and Osamu Nonoguchi were childhood friends. Hidaka became a best-selling novelist, Nonoguchi a middle-school teacher who retired to write children's books. Returning to Hidaka's home a few hours after he last saw him, Nonoguchi, accompanied by Rie, Hidaka's much younger second wife, finds his body, felled by a paperweight and strangled. Despite the alibi Nonoguchi offers Kyoichiro Kaga and the detailed written account of his movements during the fatal evening, the police detective, who once taught at Nonoguchi's school, can't help suspecting his former colleague of "creat[ing] a fictional account of the events in order to divert suspicion from himself." That's an ingenious idea, but Higashino is only getting started. As Nonoguchi and Kaga continue to spar with each other, the detective digs deeper into the past, uncovering startling revelations about the death of Hidaka's first wife, the two men's school days, and their literary careers, before coming up with a solution, and then another, and still another. Each time you're convinced Higashino's wrung every possible twist out of his golden-age setup, he comes up with a new one. If you still miss the days of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, you can't do better than this fleet, inventive retro puzzler.

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Starred review from September 1, 2014

In this new offering from the best-selling author of The Devotion of Suspect X and Salvation of a Saint, Det. Kyochiro Kaga steps to center stage to solve a strange and baffling case. When an acclaimed novelist is viciously murdered in his home the night before he moves to Vancouver with his wife, Kaga is brought in to investigate. Arriving at the crime scene, he recognizes the writer's best friend, Osamu Nonoguchi, who discovered the body. Kaga had known Nonoguchi when they worked as teachers in the same public school. As the detective unravels the relationship between an acclaimed author and his old school friend, it is clear that the link between the two men is based on shifting stories, different motives, and threads of interconnection that travel back into the past. VERDICT This smart and original mystery is a true page-turner that carries the reader through theories and relationships that will baffle, surprise, and draw out suspicion until the final few pages. With each book, Higashino continues to elevate the modern mystery as an intense and inventive literary form. [Library marketing.]--Ron Samul, New London, CT

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2014
Renowned novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found murdered in his locked study, in his locked home. He is discovered by his wife, Rie, and his closest friend, Osamu Nonoguchi. When Tokyo Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga begins to investigate, he is surprised to see Nonoguchi; they had once been colleagues on the faculty of a middle school. Evidence leads Kaga to charge Nonoguchi with murder, and Nonoguchi freely admits to it. But Kaga's superiors won't bring the case to trial without knowing why Nonoguchi murdered his friend, and the accused refuses to explain. Kaga must deduce the motive as well as the killer's identity. Higashino tells his intricate story through Kaga's notes and Nonoguchi's written responses (he, too, is a writer). As in Salvation of a Saint (2012), Higashino focuses almost solely on evidence. At the outset, his approach seems unsettling, but the Edgar nominee knows his business; Malice soon becomes awfully hard to put down.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)