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. 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 impossible to prove murders.
My Rating:
☆☆☆☆
Dates Read: September 25 - October 9 2023
Initial Publication Date: October 2018
Translation Published: December 2021
Author Origin: Japan (Osaka)
Major Characters:
Detective Kusanagi
Dr. Manabu Yukawa (“Detective Galileo”)
Kusanagi and Yukawa are back! This one took a bit longer to catch my interest, and I wasn’t as much a fan of this one as other Higashino novels, but I did like it more than A Death in Tokyo, and A Midsummer’s Equation. I do think the solution at the end was a lot more predictable than Higashino's other works (at least, I'd pretty much figured out how this one was going to go).