The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

Yasuko Hanaoka has what many would consider a good life. She lives in a small but comfortable Tokyo apartment, works in a bento shop and has raised her school-age daughter Misato alone since her split from her former husband, Shinji Togashi.

Misato’s paternity is never addressed in Keigo Higashino’s sharp The Devotion of Suspect X, a procedural that hit the bestseller list hit in Japan in 2005 and is newly translated for the English-speaking world, just as a film adaptation is in the works. Togashi was not Misato’s biological parent but her stepfather, and something of a brute – though Yasuko ended the marriage several years before the story begins, he has turned up periodically to demand money and enjoy the distress he still causes Misato.

In the fateful scene that sets up the plot, he visits the Hanaoka apartment, taunting Yasuko and refusing to leave until she gives him 20,000 yen. But it seems not money he’s after but a way back into her life and that of her daughter, and it’s when he turns his attention to the cowering Misato that her mother snaps.

The flash of what was a diabolical family dynamic is revealing: Yasuko is not so much afraid as irritated and weary, but Misato’s evident fear creates an air of menace that dissipates, albeit briefly, when Togashi lies dead, strangled with an electrical cord.

The matter of a dead body is a greater problem than Yasuko can solve, but with her reclusive neighbour Ishigami’s Sherlock Holmes-esque entrance into the story, the corpse quickly vanishes and an alibi is concocted in the event of the body’s discovery and the attention of the police.

With that, a complex web is woven. Ishigami has at once rescued and indebted Yasuko. And as we learn from his old university acquaintance, Manabu Yukawa, who returns to Ishigami’s life in the wake of the murder, the mathematician-turned-high school teacher was known by his fellow students as ‘Ishigami the Buddha’, such was his affinity for the unknown and his unreadable demeanour. It is in this implacability, and the impossibility of gauging the extent of Ishigami’s motivation and what he is capable of doing in service of it, that the intrigue lies.

Yukawa plays a savant-like role in the story, liaising alternately with the lead detective, Kusanagi (another Imperial University alum), and Ishigami as the investigation unfolds. It is he who realizes Ishigami’s feelings for Yasuko are beyond mere neighbourly concern. Towards the end, it becomes clear that Yukawa now understands everything, but he won’t solve Kusanagi’s case for him, preferring to invite the detective to see the crime through a different lens.

If you think of The Devotion of Suspect X as a literary episode Law & Order: Tokyo you won’t be far off – it is a tightly plotted procedural stemming from a single dramatic event that delivers, as the jacket promises, ‘an ending you’ll never guess’. And, surprisingly, it’s a story that could translate easily to any Western city. Higashino has a knack for finding the universal in the criminal and deserves fame beyond Japan.

3.5 / 5 stars: With this highly original thriller, Keigo Higashino’s fame is sure to spread.

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This Body of Death by Elizabeth George

“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

So goes the biblical line (Romans 7:24) that prefaces Elizabeth George’s door-stopping new crime thriller. One surmises that the ‘wretched man’ is her long-time protagonist, DI Thomas Lynley, who, as the novel begins, is absent from Scotland Yard on compassionate grounds after the murder of his wife.

The primary plot of this well-upholstered tome involves a young woman, Jemma Hastings. Wanting to make amends for past wrongs, her estranged best friend, Meredith Powell, visits Jemma’s last known address, a property in Hampshire. There, she finds Jemma’s boyfriend, Gordon Jossie, shacked up with a new woman, Gina Dickens. Gordon tells Meredith that Jemma decamped to London some months earlier without explanation, leaving behind her car and other possessions.

Thus Meredith begins an investigation, at the same time as Scotland Yard, upon the discovery of Jemma’s body in a Stoke Newington cemetery. Heading the police taskforce is Isabelle Ardery, who has been seconded as an acting replacement for Lynley within the Met. Encountering a mistrustful team, she sees that the best way to get the outcome she needs in the Hastings case is to persuade Lynley to return. (George writes conflict well, and later scenes of mutiny against Isabelle are some of the finest in the book.)

Isabelle has demons she is struggling to quell, and the perceptive Lynley notices their manifestations almost at once. Queering his pitch is the fact that the result of this investigation will determine whether Isabelle is permanently appointed or cast out, and their mutual superior, who favours Isabelle, has asked Lynley to keep an eye out for any hint that he may be mistaken.

The investigation is multifaceted and at least half a dozen viable suspects emerge. The team must interrogate the owner and lodgers of the boarding house Jemma was living in before her death, a psychic (one of the book’s less worthwhile characters) enters the picture, and when a Roman artefact of indeterminate value is found, the trail appears to lead back to Hampshire.

Cleverly, George interposes the main narrative with brief chapters elucidating a sub-plot reminiscent of the tragic case of James Bulger, the Liverpool toddler who was killed by two 10-year-olds in 1993. The eventual linking of the two storylines is unexpected and enhances the richness and pathos of the conclusion.

This Body of Death was my introduction to both George (writer of 11 novels featuring Lynley) and her DI, and I was struck by what an appealing and intriguing character she has created. Though there are several notable serial protagonists in crime fiction, I have not encountered one as well-drawn as Lynley: he is compassionate without being treacly, and inspires trust and loyalty among the jaded and battered members of his unit. He seems like someone you might know, and wish to emulate.

Additionally, there is a complex and opaque dynamic between Lynley and his former partner at the Met, Barbara Havers, a recurring character whose personal proclivities George is at pains to veil. I couldn’t decipher exactly what was at issue; other readers will likely show more intuition than I did. Doubtless, how the Lynley-Havers partnership plays out during the DI’s slow recovery will be one of the treats of George’s next work.

3 / 5 stars: Weighty but worth it.  Click here to view other Easy Mix Book Reviews.