Keigo Higashino

First things first: it was nice to meet the familiar characters again. Yukawa, Kusanagi, Utsumi. As the series progresses, the detectives are getting better and better at their jobs. This is shown very well. Kusanagi certainly knows how to interrogate a suspect! Yukawa is still the smartest person in any room, though.

I really liked the police procedural parts, and conversations between Yukawa and Kusanagi, Yukawa and Utsumi.

“What’s all this about? Come on, tell me.”
“It’s so blindingly obvious, I really shouldn’t need to.”

“You shouldn’t be the one to decide if your idea is stupid or not. And you certainly don’t want to rush to judgment about something being impossible. Buried inside a crazy idea, you can often find useful hints for solving problems. You should come out and say it, and see what a third party has to say.”

As for the mystery itself, there are two missing person cases that seem to be connected. There is grief, trauma, perseverance in the face of grief and dreams of revenge. The investigation proceeds, and the case becomes more and more convoluted. Reader: I understand what happened! Author: No, you don’t. Reader: Well, I understand now. Author: Trust me, you don’t. Reader: Oh. Now I know what happened. Author: You don’t, I told you!”

Putting the puzzle together is very interesting, but gets too convoluted. I lost track of all the characters who were not the detectives and wasn’t emotionally involved, except in the end – unlike other books by this author I had read. The story is very dark, but I was more interested in the solving of the mystery than in feeling things.

I think I am left with 3.7 stars rounded up to 4. Flawed Keigo Higashino is still better than many other things out there.

P.S. I am still planning to read everything by Keigo Higashino that had been published/will be published in English.… (more)