Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino and Giles Murray

Kusanagi pointed at Yukawa with his fork. "When it comes to unraveling impossible crimes, you're the master. It's time for Detective Galileo to stand up. A popular young girl disappears without a trace, her skeletal remains discovered three years later in the ashes of a burned-out house. There's a suspect and compelling circumstantial evidence of his guilt, but no concrete proof. When he isn't indicted, he returns to mock the girl's family. And this isn't the first time he's been suspected of the murder of a young girl, nearly twenty years ago he was tried and released due to lack of evidence. Chief Inspector Kusanagi of the Homicide Division of the Tokyo Police worked both cases. The neighborhood in which the murdered girl lived is famous for an annual street festival, featuring a parade with entries from around Tokyo and Japan. During the parade, the suspected killer dies unexpectedly. His death is suspiciously convenient but the people with all the best motives have rock solid alibis. Chief Inspector Kusanagi turns once again to his college friend, Physics professor and occasional police consultant Manabu Yukawa, known as Detective Galileo, to help solve the string of seemingly impossible murders. Praise for Keigo Higashino 'An intriguing mashup of police procedural and golden age puzzle mystery' Guardian on Newcomer

This was a pretty tight mystery and does raise the interesting question of: how do you deal with people who've almost certainly committed a crime but in a way that the justice system is unable to convict them?

For me, the standout part of this mystery is how it bounces off Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. There are plot elements that are very similar to the conclusion of that book (though it does not explicitly spoil that book), and if you've read it before, it feels like the book invites you to decide whether the mystery is going to play out in the same way or not, and if it will be different, in what ways? The book explicitly names Orient Express, Agatha Christie, and Hercule Poirot at least once each, so it's quite certainly trying to draw a connection to that.

Spoilery thoughts about that, spoiling both this book's ending as well as Murder on the Orient Express: The whole cast of suspects all had a hand in killing the victim on the Orient Express, and each of them had their own different reasons for wanting him dead. In this book, it's something similar where Hasunuma has made an enemy essentially out of this little clique of villagers frequenting Namiki-ya. But knowing Higashino, I felt like he wouldn't do a straight copy & paste from Orient Express, and would find a way to pull the rug out from under our feet. And indeed he does. I was satisfied with the ending overall. I was a little worried that we'd even remotely touch on the gross bits about possible sexual assaults (and one involving a child), but luckily we didn't. The only part that made me remotely uncomfortable was where Rumi confessed that Hasunuma blackmailed her into sleeping with him. *BARF*. Anyway, overall the mystery kept me going and I enjoyed it all.

Higashino remains my most read author in 2023 and for good reason. Would absolutely be reading more.