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review 2019-03-16 15:45
Salvation of a Saint (audiobook) by Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith, narrated by David Pittu
Salvation of a Saint - Keigo Higashino,Alexander O. Smith

When Yoshitaka married his wife, Ayane, it was on the understanding that she would at some point become pregnant. It has now been a year of trying, and still no baby. Yoshitaka sees marriage without children as pointless, so he informs Ayane that the two of them are done. Not only that, but he already has another potential mother of his children lined up. Ayane appears to quietly accept this, but in reality she has decided to put a plan into effect, something involving white powder.

A short while after Ayane and Yoshitaka's conversation, Ayane leaves to spend some time with her parents and some old friends. She provides her apprentice, Hiromi, with a spare key, just in case. As it turns out, Hiromi is Yoshitaka's secret lover. Hiromi makes Yoshitaka some coffee, and the two of them contemplate their future together. All appears well until Hiromi tries to contact Yoshitaka before their next planned date. When she gets to the house, she discovers him dead. The police determine that that the coffee he made himself was poisoned, and it isn't long before they start digging into Hiromi and Yoshitaka's secret relationship together.

Hiromi had access to the house and had even used Yoshitaka's coffee-making supplies and equipment shortly before Yoshitaka drank his poisoned cup. However, she had no motive, and it's unclear how and when she might have added the poison. Ayane had a motive but was nowhere near her husband when the poisoning happened, and if she'd sabotaged any of the coffee-making supplies or tools, Hiromi should have been poisoned as well when she and Yoshitaka made coffee together. It's up to police detectives Kusanagi and Utsumi to figure out what happened.

I listened to the first book in this series, The Devotion of Suspect X, not too long ago. Although I never got around to reviewing it, I enjoyed it and was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to the first book for a variety of reasons.

The two books had similar structures. Readers were given several key details about the case that the police would be unaware of and would have to find out on their own. In the first book, readers knew exactly how the murder happened, who committed it, and who was involved in covering it up. The question seemed to be whether the police would figure out the truth. In this book, readers knew that Ayane had to have somehow used the white powder to poison her husband. The question was how she managed it and, later, what her intentions were for Hiromi. Both books ended with twists that revealed that readers knew less about what was going on than they thought - those "key details" at the start of the books were only part of the overall puzzle.

The mystery of how Ayane arranged for her husband's coffee to be poisoned without killing Hiromi seemed overly simplistic at first but gradually became more complex, as the police found more and more places with traces of the poison but no definitive source, and no explanation for how Hiromi and Yoshitaka managed to drink coffee together earlier without both of them winding up dead.

When Utsumi involved Yukawa in the case, I wondered if Kusanagi and Yukawa would ever talk about the events at the end of the previous book. While the events of the previous book were alluded to - I'd recommend that readers new to this series start there, if only to understand the tension between Kusanagi and Yukawa - they weren't discussed in any sort of detail.

I was impatient with Kusanagi's attraction to Ayane and, like Utsumi, thought he was ignoring obvious clues in an effort to continue to view Ayane as innocent. I was actually a bit surprised that Yukawa didn't needle him over it, since his desire to protect Ayane was a bit hypocritical considering how the previous book ended.

Anyway, I had fun thinking through the problem of how Ayane managed to poison her husband, but the actual solution turned out to be a bit much. It would have taken a ridiculous amount of dedication - once the plan was begun, there was no going back and no telling anyone, and the slightest slip-up could have resulted in an unintentional death. The possibility for failure was huge and, in real life, no one would have gone through with such a plan. And the backstory for it all was kind of gross. I mean, I was somewhat sympathetic towards Ayane for a good chunk of the book - yes, she likely killed her husband, but he'd used both her and Hiromi, viewing them as nothing more than his future baby incubators. Once additional details were revealed, though, I found myself disliking most of the book's cast.

The very end of the book further soured it for me. While discussing the murder and everything that led up to it, Yukawa basically concluded that women are illogical. I would have liked nothing more than for Utsumi (a woman) to smack him at that point, but unfortunately that didn't happen. And honestly, I'm not any more pleased with Keigo Higashino if he thought "women are illogical" would make all the difficult-to-believe aspects of the murder mystery solution easier to swallow.

All in all, this was disappointing. I haven't decided yet whether I'll continue on with the series.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

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review 2017-11-02 04:34
The Moai Island Puzzle by Alice Arisugawa, translated by Ho-Ling Wong
The Moai Island Puzzle - Ho-Ling Wong,Alice Arisugawa

Alice Arisugawa is the third Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan author I’ve tried. I thought Arisugawa would also be my first female honkaku mystery author, but I didn’t bother to research that and, as it turns out, the author is actually male.

He also wrote a male character named after his pseudonym into The Moai Island Puzzle. I don’t like when authors write themselves into their own books, even if all they and their character have in common is their names, so this was a bit of a red flag for me, but I figured I’d let it pass. I was really hoping this book would be as good as the one that led me to it, Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. Or even Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders, which had some issues but was still decent.

The Moai Island Puzzle starts by introducing readers to the members of the Eito University Mystery Club. The club’s only female member, Maria Arima, invites the other members to take a week-long holiday at her uncle’s villa on a tiny island. Only Alice Arisugawa (the narrator) and Jiro Egami are able to join her, but that doesn’t mean they’re alone: ten of Maria’s family members and family friends also take a holiday on the island at around this time every three years or so.

Alice and Egami arrive at the island with every intention of having fun. In particular, they’d like to solve the puzzle that Maria’s grandfather left behind. Before he died, Maria’s grandfather had several wooden moais, statues similar to the ones on Easter Island but much smaller, installed all over the island, each facing in a different direction. These statues are somehow the key to finding a treasure that Maria’s grandfather left behind.

Hideto, Maria's beloved cousin, was supposedly close to solving the puzzle three years ago but drowned before he could locate the treasure. Maria would like to finish what he started. Unfortunately, just as a typhoon is about to reach the island, a couple people are found shot to death inside a locked room. Was it suicide, or murder?

First off, I would like to say that I was frustrated with how determined these characters were to believe that a double suicide was a possibility in this situation. One of the victims was shot in the chest, one of them in the thigh, and there was a blood trail across the entire room. The window was closed, and the door was locked with an overly tight latch. Both victims were shot by a rifle, which was nowhere to be found in the room. Several characters kept theorizing that one of the victims shot the other victim, then themselves, and then somehow threw the rifle out the window and then shut the window. It took ages for someone to finally ask whether the rifle was even outside somewhere - no one had bothered to look. Granted, it was raining and a typhoon was coming, but I doubt a dying person would have been able to throw the rifle very far.

I suppose you could argue that they all clung to the “it was a double suicide or murder-suicide” theory so hard because they didn’t want to believe they were on the island with a murderer, but so many of the facts just didn’t fit. And I just shook my head at the characters’ behavior. Even past the point they should’ve started keeping a better eye on each other, they were busy getting drunk or spending time on their own. That was one of the book’s weaknesses: too many characters had no alibi.

You’d think that should have helped muddy the waters, but it was combined with the fact that there were also few clear motives. All I had to do was think about a likely motive that Arisugawa (the author) was very carefully not bringing up, and I basically figured out the identity of the murderer. I had hoped that I was wrong and that the motive I suspected was actually a red herring. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case.

I wasn’t able to figure out how the murders were committed on my own, but part of the problem was that I didn’t care. I didn’t care about the characters, I had trouble caring about their family/relationship drama, and their conversations bored me. The final revelations didn’t change my mind about any of that.

The second part of the moai puzzle made sense to me, but the stuff the characters had to do to get to that part seemed like a stretch. And I didn’t buy that Egami was able to figure out everything about the murders the way he did, all on his own. His explanation for the locked room portion of the mystery, in particular, angered me more than shocked me. Without including spoilers, all I can say is that I had trouble believing the character would have done something like that, especially considering the way their relationships had been described.

All in all, this wasn’t worth the effort it took to read it. Very disappointing.

Additional Comments:

I noticed a few editing errors in the first 50 or so pages - sloppy verb tenses, and an instance of “peak” instead of “peek.”

The thing that bugged me the most, though, was the book’s very first illustration, a map of the island. I had thought it was the same map the characters had received, but they kept referencing marks on the map that indicated the locations of the moais, and the book’s illustration had no such marks. I still don’t know whether this was an error or whether it was deliberate on the author’s part. In the end, the marks wouldn’t have helped any (they were included later, albeit separate from the map), but the fact that they weren’t there made it feel like the author was keeping basic information from readers, and it was annoying.

Oh, and unrelated to all of that: I’m pretty sure that a normal, living snake wouldn’t feel sticky to the touch.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

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review 2014-10-26 14:11
Excellent :)
Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination - Rampo Edogawa,James B. Harris,Patricia Welch

Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is a collection of assorted short stories, ranging from straight-up crime stories to detective tales and even some oddities that aspire toward the man who inspired his pen name.

 

The stories were varying levels of engaging, and none ever bored me or prompted me to skim or skip. I don't quite feel up to taking them one by one in this review since a few of them are deceptively simple. But I'll flag a few of my favorites.

 

The Psychological Test gives us a young man with a criminal bent who thinks he knows how to outsmart the police if he commits a crime. But he finds out that all his prep can't make up for a lack of one basic thing. I loved the way his smug self-confidence slowly eroded as he began to realize he might have been outmaneuvered despite all his preparation.

 

The Cliff sets up a story of manipulation and betrayal. But by the end, the question becomes who was the betrayer and who was betrayed. It was fascinating for the way it set up expectations and then twisted... and twisted... and TWISTED until things were pointed in the complete opposite direction.

 

Other favorites: The Hell of Mirrors and Two Crippled Men, but as I said, I liked them all and I think I'll be returning to this book regularly.

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review 2013-08-27 00:00
Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Rampo Edogawa,James B. Harris The author was clearly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe (in Japanese it is pronounced Edogawa Rampo. I had to repeat it a few many times to connect the names). These short stories are very well written, almost of all them in 1st person. Most of them are mystery, about crimes, and all the characters are insane.

Very gripping stories, dark, weird and a bit creepy. I loved the Human Chair story, about a man living inside a big chair. And that twist! Sugoi.
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review 1982-01-01 00:00
The Mystery of the Japanese Clock
The Mystery of the Japanese Clock - Frit... The Mystery of the Japanese Clock - Fritz Leiber This is an unusual book for the author, mainly known for his fantasy and science fiction, as it is an essay on understanding how a cheap digital-display Japanese clock works. Leiber does not take it apart but simply observes it using his reasoning to decipher its mystery. It is a brief but splendid look at cognition and logic. The introduction is written by his son, Justin Leiber, who is a philosophy teacher. It is an odd but poetic work that seems to have a special meaning between father and son.
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