Just a day or two before his death, he told Ayane he wanted a divorce on the basis that she hadn’t fallen pregnant yet. There are two suspects in his case: his devoted wife, Ayane, an artist who makes beautiful quilts for a living, and Ayane’s young apprentice, Hiromi, who has been having an affair with Yoshitaka.įrom the outset we know that the husband is not a particularly nice person. Tests reveal there was poison in his coffee. Yoshitaka is found face down, sprawled on the wooden floor, with a spilled cup of coffee next to him. Salvation of a Saint is a very detailed police procedural focusing on the death of a young married man inside his empty apartment. For some strange reason Salvation of a Saint was made available in a Kindle edition a few months before the hardcover hit out shelves (on 7 February), so I bought it because I honestly couldn’t wait to read it.īut this book is quite a different kettle of fish to its predecessor. When Jeff, who comments here every now and then, told me last summer that there was a new Keigo Higashino novel in the offing I eagerly awaited its UK release. It was a masterpiece of plotting filled with so many twists and turns it was impossible to guess the ending, and I loved every (restrained) word of it.

When I read Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect Xin late 2011, I thought it was one of the most extraordinary crime novels I’d ever experienced. Translated from the Japanese by Alexander O. (Oct.Fiction – Kindle edition Hachette Digital 384 pages 2012. Agent: Anna Stein, Aitken Alexander Associates. How did the poison enter the victim’s system at a time when the obvious suspect, the scorned wife, was away? While readers of classic mysteries will be delighted with the elegant solution, the book will also appeal to fans of procedurals that carefully develop the relationships among the investigative team members. After Yoshitaka Mashiba tells his wife, Ayane, that their short marriage is over because she hasn’t become pregnant, Ayane thinks about “the white powder hidden in a sealed plastic bag” and decides that her husband has to die, adding a cryptic “too.” When Ayane leaves town to tend to an ailing parent, her protégé, who’s also her husband’s mistress, stops by to find Mashiba dead of what turns out to be arsenic poisoning. Howdunit, rather than whodunit, appears to be the central question of Edgar-finalist Higashino’s brilliant second mystery featuring Tokyo police detective Manabu Yukawa (after 2011’s The Devotion of Suspect X).

Salvation of a saint by keigo higashino