James Nicoll Reviews

2008’s Salvation of a Saint is the second novel in Keigo Higashino’s Detective Galileo police procedural series. The 2012 English translation is by Alexander O. Smith.

Yoshitaka Mashiba informs his wife Ayane that as she has failed to get pregnant despite a year of marriage, he will be discarding her in favour of an unnamed woman.

Ayane leaves for Sapporo, ostensibly because her father is doing poorly. She leaves her house key with her favourite student, Hiromi Wakayama… who also happens to be Yoshitaka’s secret lover. Hiromi visits the house and is horrified to discover Yoshitaka’s dead body.

Yoshitaka drank poisoned coffee. Murder or suicide?

As Detective Kusanagi and his subordinates know, if Yoshitaka were murdered, the likely suspect is his wife. However, not only does Ayane display no hint of a guilty conscience, she has an ironclad alibi. She was almost 900 kilometres from Tokyo when Yoshitaka was poisoned.

As Hiromi found the body, she clearly had access. However, even after the police discover that she was Yoshitaka’s lover, there’s no evidence tying her to the poisoning and no particular reason to think she wanted Yoshitaka dead. After all, Yoshitaka was going to leave Ayane for Hiromi, not to mention that Hiromi is pregnant with Yoshitaka’s child.

Matters become far more ambivalent when Ayane reveals Yoshitaka avoided tap water in favour of bottled water. If a bottle of water had been poisoned, then Ayane’s alibi is worthless. She could easily have introduced the poison before she left for Sapporo.

But… Ayane is the person who mentioned the bottled water. Would a guilty person do that? Furthermore, while there are traces of poison in the kettle, not to mention Yoshitaka himself, there is no evidence that there was poison in any of the bottles of water.

Believing on flimsy evidence that Ayane is guilty, and further believing that Detective Kusanagi has fallen for the beautiful widow and may be inclined to let her escape charges, Kusanagi’s subordinate Kaoru Utsumi takes the extraordinary step of turning to academic Manabu ​“Detective Galileo” Yukawa.

Yukawa had long been Kusanagi’s friend, but fell out with him when they disagreed over a previous case. Nevertheless, Utsumi believes Yukawa may be able to provide the key insight that will make a case solid enough to catch a killer.

Alas, progress is slow. Perhaps Utsumi has placed her faith in the wrong academic.

~oOo~

Saint is cousin to the old Columbo TV series, in that the book is less about whodunnit than it is about how the investigators catch the killer.

That said, the Detective Galileo books tend to feature victims who are far less sympathetic victims than those seen in Columbo (at least that’s the case this far into the series). Yoshitaka is not at all a relatable victim. He sees women as breeding stock; he has a track record of discarding woman after woman as soon as he determines that they do not meet requirements. It’s not malice, just practicality.

Unlike the previous book, The Devotion of Suspect X, we do not see the murder. We are told, in chapter one, that Ayane thinks that her husband has to die. Sure enough, Yoshitaka dies. Nevertheless it’s possible that someone else beat her to it. Or perhaps her husband decided his life was unbearable.

The plot turns on the gulf between believing one knows who the killer is and being able to prove it with the available evidence. The investigators explore various hypotheses to explain how Yoshitaka ingested poison. None of them can be proven or shown to be false. If there were a killer, they were too cunning to leave clues.

The novel itself was engaging, enough to keep me fully distracted for an evening. Though the plot drags a bit in the middle, as the various avenues of investigation turn into dead ends, the eventual explanation is rather cunning. I look forward to exploring the rest of the series¹.

Salvation of a Saint is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Because I have an e‑arc of the most recent volume and I prefer not to read series books out of order.