A Book Review
Review of Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino, a well-known and popular Japanese novelist. The book was published in 2008 in Japanese and the English translation came out in 2012. This is the second book in the Detective Galileo series.
The story opens with the main characters Yoshitaka Mashaba and his wife Ayane having a conversation about invoking their promises made before getting married – that they would wait for a year to have a child and if there weren’t any, they would split up. Hence, Yoshitaka wants to move on as for him marriage is solely for procreation and not for any emotional attachments, even though he confesses his love for her. After this, Ayane decides to go to Hokkaido to spend an indefinite time with her parents. While she is gone, her young apprentice Hiromi and Yoshitaka meet, and it becomes apparent that they are in a romantic relationship. She spends a night with Yoshitaka at his home, and they decide to meet in the evening for dinner. But Yoshitaka does not turn up at the restaurant nor respond to her calls. When she goes to his house, she finds him dead.
The mystery deepens when the coffee spilled on the floor besides his dead body is found to have traces of arsenic poisoning. Hiromi has no motive to kill him as she is pregnant with his child, Ayane was miles away from home and is least suspected and the detectives fail to establish that anyone else visited Yoshitaka at his home without his knowledge on the day of the murder. So, the question remains – how did arsenic get inside the home and in his coffee? Traces of the poison are also found on the ground beans, the coffee filter as well as the kettle in which the water for coffee had been boiled. Besides these, there are no traces of arsenic in the tap water, in the water filtration system or in the bottled water inside the fridge.
The police have a humungous task on their hands, not made easy with the fact that the lead investigator, Kasunagi, develops soft feelings for Ayane while his assistant leans towards Ayane as the culprit without having any concrete evidence to nail her. She takes help from a physics professor commonly known as Detective Galileo due to his ability to delve deep into the minutest details with his scientific way of looking at things. Kasunagi and Galilieo have been college friends and hence understand each other well.
Yoshitaka has been presented as a clever and shrewd businessman with a pragmatic view on life. He wants a family, and children are essential for him. Marriage is a means to an end and nothing more. Ayane is a fantastic artist, a well-organised and thoughtful planner of things not letting situations easily get out of her hand or overpowering her. Whereas Hiromi has been shown as a simple woman in love with Yoshitaka and deciding to keep his child. Detective Kasunagi is an experienced investigator, yet he loses sight of small details or allows himself to be coloured by his emotions for Ayane which makes him overlook the details. Unlike him, his assistant is sharp and intelligent and with the help of Detective Galileo is able to find the actual culprit.
The story becomes interesting when Detective Galileo is able to pinpoint the modus operandi of positioning the poison by the murderer and yet remains clueless with the identity.
Higashino has an engaging style of writing which is more of a narrative than descriptive. The conversations between different people dominate the narrative which is not intruded by long descriptions. This makes the novel easy to read and fast paced despite the length running into 300+ pages. Overall, an interesting read if murder mysteries are your go-to😊
