The Devotion of Suspect X, by Keigo Higashino (translated by Alexander O. Smith) sold two-million copies in Japan and won the prestigious Naoki Sanjugo prize . The main characters are: Yasuko, a divorced woman with a teenage daughter; Detective Kusanagi; Assistant Professor (of physics) Yukawa; and high school teacher (and mathematical genius) Ishigami.

The novel is a pseudo-Colombo-style, psychological police procedural. The murderer is known near the beginning of the book, and the detective is stuck within the labyrinth of the plot. Detective Kusanagi’s friend Yukawa and the mathematician Ishigami engage in an intellectual struggle — similar to real-life shogi — that results in a slow unraveling of the case’s intricacies.

There are some twists in the plot, but everything is telegraphed to the careful reader.

At first, the ending annoyed me, but then I realized it was apropos: a flaw in one of the main characters causes him/her to neglect one possibility…

An entertaining read; clever, but not too hard on the little grey cells.

Recommended.

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