Title: Salvation of a Saint
Author: Keigo Higashino
About the story: The book starts with a tiff
between a married couple. The husband, Yoshitaka, desperately wants to have a
child, while the wife unfortunately can’t bear him any offspring. This leads to
Yoshitaka deciding to call it quits. In fact the pre-nuptial
contract between them stated that if they couldn’t produce a child within a
year of their marriage they would culminate their marriage amicably. The wife,
Ayane, a famous patchwork quilter, is distressed and leaves for her parents’
house.
Everything is cordial until after
two days the husband is found dead in his own house. The reason for the death
is confirmed to be arsenous acid mixed in his cup of coffee. One of the suspects is Hiromi Wakayama, Ayane’s apprentice and Yoshitaka’s mistress. But
Hiromi is pregnant with Yoshitaka’s child, so the question then arises as to
why she would kill her own child’s father. Even though she could have easily
killed Yoshitaka as she had access to his house, she doesn’t have a plausible
motive.
The second prime suspect is
Ayane. The bitter wife has a motive to kill her betraying husband but she was
hundreds of miles away when the murder was committed. She had an air tight
alibi. Was it possible to slip the poison into her husband’s cup of coffee even
though she was miles away?
Trying to solve the perfect and flawless
crime are the Tokyo police detectives, Kusanagi and his assistant, the feisty
Utsumi. But Kusanagi’s analysis gets subjective as he falls for the mysterious
and alluring Ayane Mashiba. On the other hand, his assistant firmly believes
that Ayane is the murderer and tries all possible ways to find evidence against
her.
When the case becomes too much of
a puzzle, they call in the eccentric but brilliant physicist Manabu Yukawa also known as Detective Galileo. Can the professor solve the perfect crime and also collect
enough evidence to implicate the culprit. Read the book to solve the crime.
Review: The book is the second English
novel of the Japanese author, Keigo Higashino. The first, Devotion of Suspect
X, was a runaway hit. And this one too does not fail to disappoint the readers,
but since I have not read his first novel, I can’t really comment if it matches
to the expectation of his first book.
The book is fast paced and it’s
more like a puzzle where the reader knows the larger picture, but still has to
connect the various small pieces to form the final picture. The book is not
much about who the culprit is but about how the perfect crime was committed. After
about 250-odd pages of the book, the puzzle falls into place and one can guess
how the crime was carried out.
The book is engaging and
enthralling, as the various hypothesis on how the victim’s coffee was laced
with poison gets ruled out one at a time, till what remains is the ultimate
truth. It’s a definite must read. I loved the sardonic humour between the
detective Kusanagi and the physicist Yukawa.
Verdict: Simple narrative, a
definite page-turner and a must-read.
Rating: 4/5
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Sounds interesting. Will add it to my reading list!
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