The Devotion of Suspect X
A Detective Galileo Novel
Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X begins by revealing both a killing and the person who offers to conceal it. Yasuko Hanaoka and her daughter, Misato, kill Yasuko’s abusive former husband during a violent confrontation. Their neighbor, the solitary mathematics teacher Tetsuya Ishigami, constructs an elaborate plan to protect them. The central mystery is therefore not who committed the original act, but whether the police—and physicist Manabu Yukawa—can discover how Ishigami has reshaped the evidence. As Yukawa recognizes the mind of his former university classmate behind the apparently unbreakable alibi, the investigation becomes a contest between two exceptional reasoners. Yet the novel’s deepest concern is emotional rather than technical: what devotion permits a person to sacrifice, whether protection can become another form of control, and why a logically perfect plan may fail when confronted by conscience, grief, and human unpredictability.