Salvation of a Saint by Keigo HigashinoMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Keigo Higashino followed up his million-seller The Devotion of Suspect X with "Salvation of a Saint," another mystery featuring police detective Kusanagi and scientist Dr Yukawa. The Galileo series in fact consists of nine books (so far), of which "The Devotion of Suspect X" is the third and this the fourth. But English readers don't miss anything, because the first two books are short story collections ("Detective Galileo" and "Foreseeing Dream" respectively; a third story collection, "The Agony of Galileo" appeared at the same time as the present novel), of a rather different character than the novels: the stories concentrate on scientific puzzles as the solutions for crimes with (seemingly) supernatural overtones. Of course, Dr Yukawa ("Galileo") can't be missed here as Kusanagi is helpless on his own. But the stories are very short and offer nothing besides the puzzles (which, by the way, I would not call "honkaku" as it is not possible for the reader to solve them, if only because Higashino doesn't play fair), so they are on a very different level compared to the novels.
Now to "Salvation of a Saint." Higashino apparently wanted to do something a bit different from "The Devotion of Suspect X" so here we have three women in the main roles. On the other hand, like the previous novel, this is again an inverted detective story, i.e. we know from the start who the culprit is, and the book focuses on how the detective breaks her alibi (howdunit instead of whodunit).
Ayane is the wife of Yoshitaka Mashiba, a freak who regards women mainly as "baby machines." When he married her a year ago he told her that she must have a child within a year, otherwise he would divorce her. Now one year has passed and, as she is still without baby, he announces the divorce to her. She then decides to kill him (this is not a spoiler, but written black-on-white in the first pages of the novel).
That weekend Ayane visits her parents in Hokkaido; when leaving, she hands the house key to Hiromi, her assistant at the patchwork class she teaches - and also the mistress of Yoshitaka, who apparently can't wait until being divorced before attempting to produce a baby with another woman (the irony is that he succeeds, but won't live to enjoy it). That Saturday, Hiromi shares the bed with Yoshitaka, but she doesn't stay the night; when she returns on Sunday morning, she finds Yoshitaka dead, poisoned by arsenic-laced coffee. Besides babies, Yoshitaka was also very particular about his coffee, which he wanted made by drip and with pure water.
Ayane is the obvious suspect, but she was more than 800 kilometers away at the time of the murder. Police Detective Kusanagi refuses to believe that she could have had anything to do with the crime, and instead focuses on Hiromi. But his assistant, Kaoru Utsumi (who plays a larger role in this novel than Kusanagi), is convinced Ayane is guilty. To prove that her intuition is right, she calls in the help of Dr Manabu Yukawa.
And that is where the story gets a bit boring: Yukawa suspects there is a scientific / engineering trick to how the poison could get into the coffee, and he time and again visits the kitchen of the Mashiba house or does experiments in his lab. It feels as if one of the short stories about Galileo mentioned above has been blown up with a lot of padding to novel size. And that, while we already know who the murderer is...
The character of Ayane is by far the most interesting here (no wonder that Kusanagi falls a bit in love with her), but as it is a mystery story, it is not developed to its full potential. Higashino neglects her character and motivation, so that it is difficult to imagine how an intelligent woman could marry such a baby-freak while in her right mind - especially as she already knew she would be unable to have children. Out of disappointment, I tried to imagine how I could rewrite the novel, and tell it from the perspective of Ayane...
So this is not a very satisfying book, and I can only give it 2 stars.
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