Yasuko is a single mother who works in a Bento shop packing lunches. Her life is turned upside down when her ex-husband shows up suddenly and start to extort money from her. The situation escalates suddenly and Yasuko and her daughter end up strangling him to death. Enter neighbor Ishigami, high-school mathematics teacher and Yasuko’s secret admirer. He disposes the body and provides Yasuko and daughter with alibi’s.
Detective Kusanagi is investigating the murder, and cannot piece together the sequence of events. Yasuko and her daughter’s alibis are water-tight, but Kusanagi thinks there is something fishy but just can’t put his finger on it. He ropes in his friend Dr. Yukawa, nicknamed Galileo, a physics professor and an old classmate and friend of Ishigami.
This starts of a game of cat-and-mouse with Ishigami and Yukawa trying to out-think each other, with Yukawa bent on proving Ishigami had something to do with the murder and Ishigami, in turn, determined to protect Yasuko. It becomes evident that Ishigami is willing to sacrifice himself to protect Yasuko, and Yukawa is torn between proving his friend’s guilt and protecting him from the gallows.
This is Higashino’s first in his acclaimed “Galileo” series, and considered his best work. The premise and build-up was quite good, and I really appreciate the meticulous and detailed planning that Ishigami does.
But the weak point is Yukawa. He does not seem to be equal to the task of solving the case. A detective is supposed to live by the maxim: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. Through armchair conjecture, he just miraculously pulls the right answer out of thin air based on little more than “Oh I knew Ishigami in college”.
The unlikelihood of a police detective discussing details of ongoing investigations with civilians in procedure-mad Japan is also a hard pill to swallow. The base premise is similar to Natsuo Kirino’s Out, but while that one goes off the rails pretty quickly, this one fizzles down to a standard police procedural.
Still, the parts where the author delves into Ishigami’s out-thinking the detectives is quite entertaining to read. Worth delving into.