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. After meeting up with him again, Yukawa is convinced that Ishigami had something to do with the murder. Yukawa, known to the police by the nickname Professor Galileo, went to college with Ishigami.

Manabu Yukawa, a physicist and college friend who frequently consults with the police. Kusanagi is unable to find any obvious holes in Yasuko’s manufactured alibi and yet is still sure that there’s something wrong. When the body turns up and is identified, Detective Kusanagi draws the case and Yasuko comes under suspicion. 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 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. Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi.

Keep watching my blog for more book reviews! I just cannot help gushing over this book and thinking how I had missed reading this all these years for the book The Devotion of Suspect X was published in 2005.Įnding my review note with a point for you to ponder upon, how far would you go for someone you love but who does not give two cents about it? The corresponding line from the book – He held no aspirations of ever being anything to them. How would you react? No no, do not worry, no spoilers from my end. And then later, A feeling rose inside him, making him queasy, as though an elaborate formula he’d thought was perfect was now giving false results because of an unpredictable variable. This is a line picked from the book itself. Have you heard about P=NP problem? Basically, it asks whether it’s more difficult to think of the solution to a problem yourself or to ascertain if someone else’s answer to the same problem is correct.

It feels like a long long time since I have read a book this perfect and which associates science and mathematics in a fictional murder mystery.

The devotion of suspect