Keigo Higashino, a former engineer born in Osaka, is one of the most successful writers in Japan. He won Japan's Naoki Prize for Best Novel with this stunning thriller about miscarried human devotion. It is the first volume of the Detective Galileo series.
Ishigami, a mathematics teacher, is in love with his neighbor, a divorced mother. But her ex-husband has tracked her down, stalks her and she ends up killing him to protect her daughter. Ishigami, who has heard everything, sees this as an opportunity to get closer to her and offers to help her cover up the crime.
A corpse is found by the river. Detective Kusanagi, in charge of the investigation, quickly establishes a bond with Ishigami's neighbor. Kusanagi often consults his friend Yukawa, known as Detective Galileo, a brilliant physicist with impressive powers of logical deduction. Yukawa knew Ishigami from their time as students at the university. He remembers his remarkable intelligence, dazzling intuitions and enigmatic personality. And also the famous mathematical aporia that captivated them both: is it more difficult to find the solution to a problem than to verify it? Guided by a sinister premonition, the physicist confronts the mathematician in a fascinating joust for the truth.
The author composes a relentless detective novel in which the cold joy of deduction competes with the mad logic of passion.
The characters are set in a culture without Christian values. There is no religious belief to guide moral behavior. It is a novel with police officers seeking to uncover criminals and enforce the law, while the criminals try to construct false leads. There are no inconvenient descriptions.