The Devotion of Suspect X
Yasuko, a single mother working at a Tokyo lunch shop, kills her abusive ex-husband when he shows up at her apartment threatening her and her daughter. Her reclusive neighbor, the brilliant high school math teacher Ishigami, hears the struggle through the wall and quietly offers to handle what comes next. He constructs, with the same care he brings to a proof, an airtight alibi and a body-disposal plan designed to defeat any ordinary police investigation. The detective assigned to the case might have stopped there, except that he calls in his old college friend Yukawa, a physicist known as Detective Galileo, who knew Ishigami in their university days. Keigo Higashino's novel is less a whodunit than a duel between two extraordinary minds, and one of the most acclaimed contemporary Japanese crime novels.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Devotion of Suspect X
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
When divorced Tokyo lunch-counter worker Yasuko kills her abusive ex-husband in self-defense, her quiet math-teacher neighbor Ishigami offers to handle it. Detective Galileo, a college friend of Ishigami, takes the case.
Yes. The Devotion of Suspect X is the third book in Keigo Higashino's Detective Galileo series but the first translated into English, where it became the most popular entry point. The series has more than 10 books.
No. The Devotion of Suspect X is direct in style and around 300 pages. It is widely cited as one of the most accessible Japanese mystery novels available in English translation.
The Devotion of Suspect X was written by Keigo Higashino, published in 2011 by Little Brown and Company.
The Devotion of Suspect X is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.