REVIEW: The Devotion of Suspect X (book) by Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander

The Devotion of Suspect X is a Japanese mystery novel, the first in Higashino's Detective Galileo series (at least in terms of English language releases). I bought my copy of this volume brand new.

Review:

Yasuko is a single mother who works in a lunch shop. She used to work at a hostess club but has since left that life behind - along with her abusive ex-husband, Togashi. Unfortunately, Togashi manages to track her down once again, and this time things escalate to the point that Yasuko strangles him to death in an effort to protect herself and Misato, her teen daughter. Yasuko is still grappling with what she's done when her next door neighbor, a math teacher named Ishigami, stops by and calmly offers to help.

Ishigami is a quiet and solitary man whose only interest in life is mathematics...and Yasuko. He had gotten into the habit of stopping by her workplace to buy lunch, just to see her. He has no illusions that she might ever feel the same about him. When he hears the commotion in her apartment, he immediately offers to help. He isn't shocked by what's happened - his only concern is the problem presented by Togashi's death, and Yasuko and Misato's safety. He'll do anything to help them, so he takes care of literally everything, disposing of Togashi's body and laying out exactly what Yasuko and Misato must do in order to deal the police's inevitable suspicion.

The one thing Ishigami doesn't take into account is that the police will involve Yukawa, a physicist who's the only person he's ever met whose intellect is a match for his own.

This was technically a reread - my first time through this story was via a library audiobook back in 2018. I could remember some of the mystery's solution, but I forgot key pieces. As a result, my reread almost felt like a first read. The ending was just as much of a gut punch this time around as it was in 2018.

The reader knows everything about the murder right from the start - the big mystery isn't whodunnit, but "how are they managing to hide it?" There's lots of evidence, although readers can see some of Ishigami's efforts to hide what really happened. Yasuko and Misato both have an alibi, but it's shaky enough that the police keep poking at it. So why can't they find any of the holes in their story that surely must be there?

I remembered enough of Ishigami's trick to have some idea of what to look out for, but I had forgotten just how far he was willing to go. This mystery had some masterful misdirection, and yet it somehow never felt as though the author cheated. This was at least in part due to the sort of character Ishigami was - coldly logical, and yet for some reason willing to do something as apparently illogical as covering up a murder for a woman who barely knew he existed. Sure, he was interested in her, but readers had ample opportunities to see that Ishigami wasn't the sort of person to be ruled by his emotions. The overall effect was a fascinating puzzle with a few ill-fitting pieces...up until Higashino laid the whole horrible and tragic thing out at the end.

This left me with complicated feelings. I read this for its tricky puzzle and somehow got blindsided by its surprise emotional aspects. Once Yasuko accepted Ishigami's help, there was really no good way for things to end. I felt terrible for everyone involved, and yet I think I'd have felt just as terrible, for different reasons, if things had turned out another way.

At any rate, this was definitely worth a reread. It's a shame that the next book in the series isn't nearly as good as this one.