Malice by Keigo Higashino

Disclaimer: Spoilers! This is a review, what do you expect?

After I read The Devotion of Suspect X and liked it so much, my friend and her mom immediately recommended to me the Detective Kaga series from the same author. According to her, the two series from the author – Detective Kaga and Detective Galileo, differ in the way the mysteries are solved. Galileo focuses more on the scientific aspect and Kaga focuses more on the human and psychological aspect. As much as I love science and scientific things, I love humans and psychology even more, so I decided to start with Malice, which is the first in the series.

Malice deals with the murder of a famous author, Hidaka, ostensibly by his good friend, and a less famous author, Nonoguchi. The initial unravelling of the facade and the clues were fairly obvious, and Nonoguchi was caught and incarcerated very early. However the thing of importance in the story is motive. The clues were set out and arranged in a way that supported a very different narrative than what actually happened. The story isn’t quite novel in terms of the devices used. Unreliable narrator – which is one of the principal devices used in the beginning, was promulgated by Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or deception of motive, which my friend assures me, has been done countless times. What stands out here, again, is the uneasiness that you feel when you see a normal human being doing things which are very psychopathic. Nonoguchi is a very normal human being, and almost feels extremely relatable. When it is revealed that this character did some pretty vile things in a calculated way, that jars you, makes you feel unstable. Higashino is able to do this pretty effectively here.

The comparisons with The Devotion of Suspect X, which I had reviewed earlier are pretty obvious. Here are two crimes which seem obvious on the surface, but is designed to feint you with a carefully laid out carpet of misleading clues. However, there are some fundamental differences. The maths professor from The Devotion, had a robotic demeanour, and had the reputation for being extremely calculating to the point of being unnerving. For him to pull off something like this makes a sort of poetic sense. But here Nonoguchi is an everyday relatable man. In the Devotion, there were multi-layer misleading clues, with a final layer so convincing that no one would doubt it. The layers are similar here, but instead of being deceitful about who committed the crime, and (spoiler) who was killed, here it is, why someone was killed.

In the end, it was impossible of me to think of this in isolation from The Devotion, so this one gets 4.5 stars out of 5. The Devotion was an entirely different level of deception and emotional impact, and I felt almost let down at the end here, I felt a bit underwhelmed.

Still a good book though. Just do not read right after The Devotion of Suspect X.