We don’t find out until the very end, but as we follow the police investigation step by step you want to reach into the book and tell Detective Kusanagi (who also featured in The Devotion of Suspect X) and his department’s newest recruit, Kaoru Utsumi, to look in the dresser, look in the dresser! But we are left in two minds about this powder: is it the poison used to kill Yoshitaka, or something else entirely? Guess I’ll be using that soon, she thought”. Just after Ayane is told that her marriage is over “she glanced at her dresser, thinking about the white powder hidden in a sealed plastic bag.

From the outset the reader is let in on a little secret. Once again Higashino dishes up a murder mystery like no other. They had been married just a year and he didn’t see the point in “continuing on like this if we can’t have children”.īut there’s a hitch: Ayane was hundreds of miles away visiting her parents when he died. 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.

Fiction – Kindle edition Hachette Digital 384 pages 2012.

Salvation of a saint by keigo higashino