Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X

by Keigo Higashino

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • Published:
  • Feb 2011, 304 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

Winner of the prestigious Naoki Prize for Best Novel— the equivalent of the National Book Award.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor. Overhearing the commotion, Yasuko's next door neighbor, middle-aged high school mathematics teacher Ishigami, offers his help, disposing not only of the body but plotting the cover-up step-by-step.

When the body turns up and is identified, Detective Kusanagi draws the case and Yasuko comes under suspicion. Kusanagi is unable to find any obvious holes in Yasuko's manufactured alibi and yet is still sure that there's something wrong. Kusanagi brings in Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a physicist and college friend who frequently consults with the police. Yukawa, known to the police by the nickname Professor Galileo, went to college with Ishigami. After meeting up with him again, Yukawa is convinced that Ishigami had something to do with the murder. What ensues is a high level battle of wits, as Ishigami tries to protect Yasuko by outmaneuvering and outthinking Yukawa, who faces his most clever and determined opponent yet.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. In this brutally laconic translation, cold logic battles warm hearts throughout this elegant proof of the wages of sin, in which everyone suffers and no one can ever win!" - Publishers Weekly

"Starred Review. this literary psychological thriller is a subtle and shifting murder mystery. It will make readers redefine devotion and trust in an otherwise complete stranger." - Library Journal

"Starred Review. The Devotion of Suspect X will make readers redefine devotion and trust in an otherwise complete stranger." - Library Journal

"Starred Review. This character-driven mystery by the prolific Higashino has much to recommend it, including a droll Columbo-like sleuth and a great surprise ending." - Kirkus Reviews

"What's in an alibi? In The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino weaves a web of intellectual gamesmanship in which the truth is a weapon that leads both police and readers astray. The ingenious conclusion is so unexpected that is difficult to imagine anyone seeing it coming. Smart, smart characters." - Jacqueline Winspear, New York Times bestselling author of Maisie Dobbs Mystery series, including The Mapping of Love and Death

"The Devotion of Suspect X has all the brilliant intricacy of the best Golden Age mysteries - puzzle within puzzle, twist after twist - with a modern sensibility.  It is a wonderful, fresh take on the classic mystery's intellectual struggle between protagonist and antagonist, adds to it all the right amounts of tension and pacing, places it in a fascinating setting, and gives of all of this plenty of heart - enough to make me hope we haven't seen the last of Yukawa and Kusanagi." - Jan Burke, New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award winning author of Kidnapped and Bones

"Japanese crime writers excel at many things: one is the slow tightening of the noose that's at the fast-pounding heart of the police procedural.  The Devotion of Suspect X  is a terrific book in that tradition and it's about time American readers got a crack at it." - SJ Rozan, Edgar Award winning author of On the Line

"The Devotion of Suspect X is elegant and spare and gripping and vivid. Most of all, however, it is deeply moving, and this is what sets it apart!" - Jesse Kellerman, bestselling author of Trouble and The Executor

"Irresistible! A mind-twisting story that will have readers plunging in to try to solve the crime before the math genius, the physics professor, or the cop get there first." - Nancy Pickard, New York Times bestselling author of The Scent of Rain and Lightning and The Virgin of Small Plains

This information about The Devotion of Suspect X was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Shreeya Tambe

Loved it!
Great novel.. you won't want to put it down...

K.U.

Reminiscent of Hitchock!
Keigo Higashino is now one of my favorite authors. His "mysteries" are quite intellectually stimulating - enough to be considered literary fiction. His characters and stories reveal layer after layer of depth and feeling. I would highly recommend this book!

Rachel B. (Waynetown, IN)

Twists and turns to a dramatic end
I very much enjoyed this book, and will be recommending it to my book club primarily because so often in the story the sense of what is right and fair is distorted by sympathy for Ishigami and Yasuko, even when in hindsight it would be completely unjust for things to turn out the way they would have liked. I appreciate that not only is the big picture spectacular at the very end, but also that once the whole of events is revealed I found myself remembering little glimpses all along the way that lent validation to the final chapters. Very well thought-out and much potential for group discussion.

Maggie R. (Canoga Park, CA)

A stew of elements
I collect mystery/espionage set in other countries and find this a backdoor into other cultures. The Devotion of Suspect X did not disappoint. And it has the added element of the mathematical puzzlement to add suspense.

Nikki R. (Irvine, CA)

Misplaced Devotion ?
Having grown up in Gardena, CA post WWll the Japanese culture was very familiar to me. I fell under the spell of this book quickly and virtually clipped from page to page. The writing started out a bit stilted, but with the quickly developed plot and twists it soon didn't matter. It's all here; love, loyalty, dishonesty, guilt, regret, and of course murder. Would love to see this as a movie! If I have any complaint the ending felt like I hit a wall. It wasn't very satisfying.

Mary O. (Boston, MA)

Haunting
This is truly a murder mystery or "whodunit" page turner! It is an engrossing read where you don't want to take a break when you are reading it. This book continues to haunt you after you finish the last page. It is a book about love, blind devotion, sacrifice, truth and justice. With some surprising twists and turns, the question remains "does justice prevail?"

...19 more reader reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Keigo Higashino Author Biography

Keigo Higashino is a bestselling author in Japan with over three dozen bestsellers, hundreds of millions of copies of his books sold worldwide, and nearly twenty films and television series based on his work. He won the Naoki Prize for his first novel featuring Detective Galileo. He lives in Tokyo.

Alexander O. Smith has translated a wide variety of novels, manga, and video games, for which he has been nominated for the Eisner Award, and won the ALA's Batchelder Award. He studied at Dartmouth College and holds an M.A. in Classical Japanese from Harvard University. He lives in Vermont.

Link to Keigo Higashino's Website

Name Pronunciation
Keigo Higashino: ke-ee-go hee-ga-shee-no

Other books by Keigo Higashino at BookBrowse

5 more...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more mysteries...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...
  • Book Jacket
    The Rest of You
    by Maame Blue
    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

Second hand books are wild books...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.