Under the Midnight Sun

Starred review from August 29, 2016
Though Higashino’s previous puzzle mysteries, like 2011’s The Devotion of Suspect X, matched cleverness with well-rounded characters, the Japanese author ups his game with this epic whodunit featuring an intricate plot that spans two decades. In 1973, Osaka homicide detective Sasagaki looks into the fatal stabbing of pawnshop owner Yosuke Kirihara in an abandoned building. From the tidiness of the victim’s clothes and other signs that suggest there was no struggle, Sasagaki concludes that Kirihara knew his killer. Interviews with Kirihara’s widow and a coworker lead nowhere, but Sasagaki refuses to give up on the case. His continuing investigation plays out against the story of Kirihara’s 10-year-old son, Ryo, and Yukiho Nishimoto, the daughter of a customer of the dead man who may have had more than a professional relationship with him. Higashino successfully sustains momentum, despite the book’s considerable length, as he traces Ryo and Yukiho’s different paths to adulthood and plausibly portrays their psychological development. Subtle clues fairly set up the dramatic and surprising resolution.

Higashino leaves behind the increasingly weighty cases of Detective Galileo (A Midsummer's Equation, 2016, etc.) for an even more daunting stand-alone that traces the fallout of an unsolved murder through nearly two decades.Yosuke Kirihara is found in an abandoned building a kilometer away from the Osaka home that doubled as his pawnshop, stabbed five times. His wife, Yaeko, would be the obvious suspect even if she weren't a former escort a generation younger than her husband, but Detective Junzo Sasagaki can find no evidence against her. He focuses instead on Fumiyo Nishimoto, a customer whose home in Yoshida Heights Kirihara had visited shortly before his death, but Fumiyo provides an alibi--though Tadao Terasaki, the lover who provides it, is killed in a car crash--and the case fades away. So, for quite a while, does Sasagaki; instead, Higashino follows the lives of two children involved in the case, Kirihara's 10-year-old son, Ryo, and his customer's young daughter, Yukiho. As they make their ways through adolescence and into adulthood, corruption begins slowly and steadily to take its toll on Ryo and Yukiho. He drifts into a life of pimping his male school friends and stealing computer-game software before it can be copyrighted; she's adopted by elegant Reiko Karasawa when her mother dies and, blossoming into fatal beauty, drifts through a series of fraught friendships and romances, one of which ends in an equally fraught marriage. All the while, Sasagaki, his efforts supplemented by those of private investigator Satoshi Imaeda, keeps an unobtrusive eye on the two surviving children, preparing to close the case, though many readers will long since have anticipated his unsparing climactic revelations. Despite its epic length, Higashino keeps his world remarkably claustrophobic, scattering just enough references to movies, current events, and first-generation home computers to let you know where the lead characters, aging but powerless to change, stand as the story rolls toward its bleakly preordained end. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2016

A murder in 1973 Osaka is never solved, and Edgar Award finalist Higashino shows the consequences for both the obsessive detective pursuing the case and the two people most touched by it: Ryo, the son of the murdered man, and Yukiho, the daughter of the prime suspect. Billed as much as grand social study as crime; the publisher makes comparison to Les Miserables and Crime and Punishment, and the South China Morning Post brings in David Foster Wallace.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2016
In Osaka, a pawnbroker is stabbed in an abandoned warehouse. The case looks simple once detectives discover the pawnbroker's clandestine visits to a young widow's apartment. But lead detective Sasagaki can't crack the widow's or her boyfriend's alibis, and his case goes cold when both suspects die in questionable accidents. Instinctively, Sasagaki knows that this case will have dangerous ripples, and he keeps tabs on the pawnbroker's young son, Ryo, and the widow's daughter, Yukiho. Their stories turn dark as Ryo's business acumen evolves into underworld schemes while beautiful Yukiho's friends fall victim to a series of violent sexual assaults. Sasagaki, undeterred through years of investigating on his own, knows that the key to solving the pawnbroker's murder lies in Ryo and Yukiho's destructive paths. Edgar-nominated Higashino (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2011) revisits the dangerous codependence of bonds forged in murder with this complex, elegant psychological thriller. A starkly rendered portrayal of modern Japanese culture that will draw fans of fellow Japanese thriller master Natsuo Kirino's novels and the haunting Scandinavian tales of Karin Fossum.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)