The Devotion of Suspect X

Not a whodunit but rather a how to get away with it thriller. By the end of the first chapter Yasuko Hanoaka and her daughter Misato have killed Yasuko's ex-husband Togashi. You could argue it was in self-defence but that's not the point. Yasuko's neighbor, the heavyset, round-faced Ishigami overhears the commotion and deduces their predicament. Clearly infatuated with Yasuko, he offers up his services in covering up the crime. “Trust me” he says, “Logical thinking will get us through this.”

Ishigami, the math genius stuck in a dead end job teaching highschool, finds himself pitted against his former classmate Manabu Yukawa, the physics professor that goes by the moniker Inspector Galileo when he helps with police investigations. Yukawa at one point asks whether it's more difficult to create the unsolvable problem or to solve that problem.

That's what's happening here. On one hand you're working with Ishigami to create the perfect alibi while working alongside Yukawa trying to find the chinks in the armour and dismantle the perfect crime. There's clues enough to tease you but Higashino keeps throwing out curveballs.

A clean translation of some direct, workmanlike prose that propels the story forward - this was a unique, to me, take on the thriller genre.