Despite its epic length, Higashino keeps his world remarkably claustrophobic, scattering just enough references to movies,...
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.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10579-0
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Middling for a matchless series (Unseen, 2013, etc.) in which, just as in grand opera, nothing ordinary ever happens.
After two intense stand-alones (Pretty Girls, 2015, etc.), Slaughter brings back the regulars whose personal problems are just as dark, urgent, and potentially violent as those of the criminals they investigate.
In the two weeks since medical examiner Dr. Sara Linton joined her lover, agent Will Trent, on the payroll of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, everything’s been fine, except of course for Will’s uneasy sense that Angie Polaski, the long-estranged wife he just can’t get around to divorcing, will never let him alone. How right he is. A Glock found near the scene of a grisly murder is quickly traced to Angie. Now Amanda Wagner, the GBI deputy director who mercilessly rides Will and his partner, Faith Mitchell, wants to know what Angie had to do with the death of Dale Harding, a thoroughly miserable human being who was a detective with the Atlanta PD. The case is already a minefield: the murder scene, drenched in blood that isn’t Harding’s, is the construction site of the All Star, a nightclub owned by basketball star Marcus Rippy, who’s well-known to Will as the man who raped Keisha Miscavage and, thanks to his feral manager, Kip Kilpatrick, and an army of lawyers, walked away two weeks ago without so much as a summons. The forensic evidence indicates that at least one other person was seriously wounded at the murder scene before vanishing. Forget about indicting Rippy for the crime; Will would be lucky to interview him. Just when it seems that Will’s ties to the case couldn’t become more fraught, Slaughter interrupts the action for a hundred-page flashback to the week before the killing. Things get clearer but no less tense.
Middling for a matchless series (Unseen, 2013, etc.) in which, just as in grand opera, nothing ordinary ever happens.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-243021-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The charming heroine has all too little to work with in this overlong and not very mysterious series opener.
Dirty deals are covered up by murder.
In a departure from her Flower Shop series (Tulips Too Late, 2018, etc.), Collins introduces a divorced mother who’s returned to Michigan and the suffocating bosom of her Greek family. Athena works at her father John Spencer’s garden center along with her younger sister, Delphi. Under the name Goddess Anon, she blogs out her frustrations with her family, who, failing to recognize that they’re the subjects of the blog, find it highly amusing. Working late one night, Athena disturbs a man trying to remove something from a life-size marble statue of her namesake that her grandfather had recently purchased, planning to use it to adorn his diner. Talking to strange men alone is not a wise idea, but Case Donnelly’s extraordinary good looks and his tale that the valuable statue actually belongs to him turn her head. The statue, however, is the least of her worries, for all the shops on Greene Street, known as Little Greece, are about to be torn down by powerful developer Grayson Talbot Jr., whose late father had planned to cancel the project. Athena, who’s dating annoying lawyer Kevin Coreopsis to keep her mother happy, soon becomes involved in protecting Case, who’s been seen leaving the scene of Talbot employee Harry Pepper’s murder. It seems a strange coincidence that everyone who was opposed to tearing down Little Greece has suddenly died. Believing Case innocent, Athena hides him on her grandfather’s rarely used boat, and a haircut, a beard, and some bronzer turn him into a Greek fisherman. As the leaders of the Greek community fight to save their shops, Athena attracts Talbot’s interest. He tries to bribe her by offering both an area for the diner and a large apartment for her grandparents in the new construction he plans. Her refusal puts her in danger from someone who’s already killed twice.
The charming heroine has all too little to work with in this overlong and not very mysterious series opener.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2433-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
