Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino

First published in Japan in 2021; published in translation by Minotaur Books on December 17, 2024

As American crime fiction once did, Japanese crime novels focus on mysteries that must be solved. Modern American crime novelists tend to focus on the elements of a thriller — fistfights, shootouts, chases — with less attention paid to unraveling a mystery. When American writers try to incorporate detection into their thrillers, they too often make a botch of it by favoring sensational reveals over credible puzzles.

Keigo Higashino has become one of crime fiction’s best mystery writers. His books move quickly but they aren’t action novels. Higashino writes traditional mysteries, planting clues that the reader will see in a different light after investigators piece them together.

Invisible Helix begins with a desperate mother who leaves her baby and a handmade doll at the gate of an orphanage. The baby’s father died during Hidemi Negishi’s pregnancy. Without the father’s income, Hidemi felt she had no choice but to give up the child.

In the present, Sonoka Shimauchi works in a flower shop. Her mother, Chizuko Shimauchi, was raised in the orphanage that later employed her. Chizuko raised Sonoka as a single mother. Chizuko met her best friend, children’s book author Nae Matsunaga, while working at the orphanage.

After Chizuko dies, Ryota Uetsuji comes to the flower shop to order floral arrangements for videos he’s shooting. Ryota begins to woo Sonoka and soon they are living together. When Ryota notices that Sonoka always sleeps next to a handmade doll, Sonoka explains that it belonged to her mother. If the doll seems like a Dickensian plot device, never expect the obvious from Higashino.

Things seem to be going well for Sonoka until Ryota begins to abuse her. When Ryota’s body is recovered from Tokyo Bay with a bullet hole in its back, Sonoka becomes the chief suspect. Sonoka promptly disappears with the help of a friend who knows that the police are coming for her. Sonoka’s disappearance hours before the police want to question her contributes to suspicion that she is a murderer.

The investigation of Ryota’s death falls to Chief Inspector Kusanagi, the co-protagonist of this series. He is assisted by his old friend, Professor Manabu Yukawa, whose ability to piece clues together until they form a solution earned him the nickname “Professor Galileo.”

One of Ryota’s most recent outgoing cellphone calls was to Hidemi Negishi, mama-san of a hostess bar known as VOWM. Kusanagi is assigned to interview Hidemi because he is “an aficionado of hostess clubs.” He brings Yukawa, who quickly discerns the true origin of the club’s name. A working knowledge of both Chinese and Japanese is required to figure it out. Fortunately for those of us who lack that knowledge, Yukawa explains how the odd name is relevant to the story.

As is customary in these books, Yukawa solves the mystery of Sonoka’s disappearance and of her husband’s murder in his own way, even if he has to go behind Kusanagi’s back to assure that his own version of justice is done. Yukawa even solves a mystery that changes his life, one that is tangentially related to the murder investigation. Maybe that’s a bit much, but the plot is otherwise nice and tidy, as a reader might expect of Japanese crime fiction.

Events unfold in ways that are different from those the reader will likely imagine. Higashino skillfully inspires erroneous conclusions about the identities of and relationships between key characters. The reader won’t learn the truth until the plot has twisted multiple times. Paragraph by paragraph, Higashino constructs the clever plot that his fans have come to expect.

Hostess clubs are an aspect of Japanese life that tend to fascinate Americans. The “Darwinian world of nightlife” in Japan isn’t explored in much depth, but it adds atmosphere to the story. The ending is in some respects a little sad, a bit touching, but the story is never marred by melodrama.

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Deadbeat by Adam Hamdy

Published by ‎ Atria Books on December 3, 2024

Crime and Punishment remains the greatest story about a murderer’s guilt. Adam Hamdy is no Dostoevsky, but Deadbeat takes an entertaining if over-the-top look at how guilt affects the life of a serial killer who learns that he might not have been murdering for a good cause.

Peyton Collard was a military engineer. He left the military for a civilian job so he could build a stable family. Unfortunately, he celebrated the job with too much alcohol, drove drunk, and killed nineteen-year-old Freya Prisco in a traffic accident. Collard went to prison for manslaughter, his wife left him, and he’s done nothing but accumulate debt since his release. Not to mention that Freya occasionally scolds him for killing her.

Prison taught Collard to take a beating, but that seems to be his only life skill. Having not learned much of a lesson from his manslaughter vacation, Collard tries to drown his guilt with nightly drinking at a bar with Jim Steadman, another ex-con. As protagonists go, Collard is more self-destructive than most. Readers might nevertheless sympathize with him because he has the good grace to feel guilty. Unfortunately, he so often tells us about his guilt that I got tired of hearing it. Dostoevsky let the reader see how guilt was consuming Raskolnikov; Collard can’t stop narrating his guilty thoughts.

A small bundle of cash turns up in Collard’s mailbox with the address of a website. A recorded message on the website promises to pay Collard a lot more money if he murders a nightclub owner who is dealing drugs and generally being a bad guy.

“Would you kill a bad person if doing so would make the world a better place for someone you love?” A murder that improves the world is still murder, but Collard asks and answers the question from the perspective of desperation rather than morality. Desperate men, Collard believes, don’t have “the luxury of moral certainty.” Dismissing morality as a disposable luxury seems to be a widely held opinion in today’s America. That’s a topic a book club could discuss in the unlikely event its members choose to read Deadbeat.

Collard sets morality aside and commits the murder. He’s paid but is quickly beaten and robbed by thugs who were drinking in his favorite bar. He commits a second murder to recoup his loss, then a third to pay for a nice place where he can hide from the thugs while impressing his daughter. His benefactor tells him that the second victim launders money for the mob and his third is a priest who diddles children.

As is the vigilante way, Collard tells himself that his killings are righteous. The ghosts of his victims disagree. Unsurprisingly, Collard learns that the ghosts might have a legitimate beef with him. The realization that his victims might not have been as evil as he thought compounds his growing guilt.

Collard is something of a dolt for not realizing he’s being played, but he’s a desperate dolt and the line between desperation and greed is thin. He becomes a baffled dolt when the bodies of his victims are mutilated in the morgue, postmortem crimes he didn’t commit but that inspire the media to refer to the serial killer as the West Coast Ripper. He’s an even bigger dolt for not understanding that he will be blackmailed into continuing his murder spree by the person who financed it. Can people really be this stupid? Sure they can, but I found it hard to believe that Collard would not have thought this through before committing the first murder. The guy is an engineer, after all.

This setup establishes the mysteries that must be resolved before the story concludes. Who paid Collard to commit the murders? What ties the victims together? Why are the bodies of his victims being mutilated postmortem? How do the thugs track him to his new home and why are they certain that he has hidden bundles of cash?

I found it hard to warm up to Collard — he’s self-pitying and, well, he’s a serial killer — despite his frequent and sincere proclamations of love for his daughter, whose need for a supportive father supposedly motivates Collard’s crime spree. My favorite character is a clichéd hooker with a heart of gold who gives Collard comfort when no one else will. Her refusal to judge Collard (she carries guilt of her own for an act of self-defense) might support a book club discussion about the evil of judging others, but I’m not sure that general rule applies to serial killers.

The hooker joins Collard in bemoaning life’s unfairness; to her, fairness is “just a comforting lie that’s designed to stop people tearing each other apart with the unfairness of it all.” She also offers a form of absolution when she assures Collard that what he did “makes sense when seen through the lens of your life,” a perspective that “means you’re not a monster, because monsters walk alone.” I’m not sure the hooker makes these points credibly, but I give Hamdy credit for taking a chance with his effort to create a sympathetic serial killer.

Two unimaginative action scenes turn Collard into a Reacher-like superhero near the novel’s end. I suppose Hamdy couldn’t come up with anything better to achieve his desired outcome, but Collard’s sudden proficiency in armed combat was one of several plot twists that I didn’t buy. The answer to the novel’s biggest question — what connects the people Collard is instructed to kill — is clever but preposterous.

Identifying the person who pays Collard scads of money to commit the murders isn’t difficult (there aren’t a lot of wealthy characters), but the criminal scheme is a ridiculously complicated way to achieve the villain’s end. The bad guy’s plan requires Collard to behave repeatedly in exactly the way that the villain predicts. The scheme is so unlikely to succeed that nobody with any sense would implement it — but then, if the villain had any sense, we wouldn’t have a plot, would we?

The artificially joyous ending is a gift to readers who insist on happy endings. Whether the protagonist deserves a happy ending is debatable, although forgiving readers who have sympathy for Collard might be pleased. Readers who think forgiveness should be accompanied by justice might be disappointed, although everyone has a different concept of justice, so it’s difficult to say whether readers will be satisfied with the outcome. I’m recommending the story because it entertains, not because I found it credible or was drawn to its muddled message.

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Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 3, 2024

Gabriel’s Moon is the sort of book that Hitchcock would have filmed. It has a plot he favored — an innocent man is caught up in a cloak-and-dagger world, manipulated by people he thought he could trust until they try to kill him, forcing him to use his wits to survive.

The story takes place during the Cold War. It builds on evidence that President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to assassinate the Congo’s new Prime Minister because of his paranoid belief that Patrice Lumumba was too cozy with communists. The CIA has never been a friend of democracy.

Gabriel Dax is a London-based travel writer. He’s also something of a part-time spy. His brother Sefton works for the Foreign Office and, although they are not close (“both of them recognized their essential incompatibility”), Sefton occasionally asks Gabriel for a favor — hand delivering a small package to someone in Copenhagen, for example. Gabriel’s work, including a position with a leftwing magazine, gives him an excuse to travel, and he doesn’t mind earning extra money by performing clandestine tasks that seem reasonably safe.

Gabriel is working on a book about rivers, juxtaposing familiar waters like the Mississippi and unfamiliar (to the British anyway) locales like Hattiesburg. Rivers are a familiar metaphor for the flow of a life, and Gabriel recognizes that his own runs “underground, more like a sewer than a river.”

A writing assignment for the magazine takes him to Léopoldville, in the newly independent republic of the Congo, where an old friend from university is now the Minister of Health. He records an interview with Lumumba, who rambles a bit about Eisenhower’s plot to assassinate him, spearheaded by three names Gabriel doesn’t recognize. After Lumumba is murdered, the tape recordings prove to be more dangerous for Gabriel than any clandestine work he does for his brother.

Flying back from the Congo, Gabriel notices an attractive woman reading one of his travel books. After he encounters the woman again, he learns that their meetings are not a coincidence, that she — Faith Green — is also a spy. Soon he finds himself doing favors for her. Faith sends him to Spain to purchase drawings from an artist and deliver them to someone else. The "someone else" turns out to be Kit Caldwell, the CIA station chief in Madrid. The tasks pay well and Gabriel gets a buzz from working undercover.

As the story progresses, it becomes unclear whether Caldwell is a good guy or a bad guy, but Gabriel helps him when he seems to be in a pickle, perhaps because he senses that labels don’t matter in the shadowy world of espionage. Caldwell seems to be a decent person regardless of his ideology. The truth about Caldwell comes as something of a surprise, but there are bigger surprises to come. That’s one of the joys of spy novels; characters are so often not what they seem.

The story opens with a fire that burned down Gabriel’s childhood home. Gabriel has always lived with the belief that a candle in a moon-shaped nightlight in his room caused the fire. He has untrustworthy memories of seeing his mother on the kitchen floor and knowing that she was dead before he was rescued. His adult sessions with a therapist to treat his insomnia give the reader insight into his personality. Gabriel recovers important memories after following his therapist’s advice to learn more about the events surrounding his mother’s death, developing a critical story within the larger plot.

Gabriel’s personality evolves during his relationship with Faith, about whom he becomes a bit obsessive. Gabriel gains self-confidence as he overcomes obstacles, including near-death experiences, but is he sufficiently confident to deal honestly with his attraction to Faith? The question becomes moot when he discovers her true nature — and his own.

Ultimately, Gabriel’s Moon is about the birth and maturation of a spy. By the end, Gabriel would like to return to his life as a writer, but like joining the mob, once you enter the world of espionage, there’s no way to leave. Perhaps that means that Gabriel Dax will turn up again. As a spy novel fan, I can only hope that’s true, as William Boyd knows how to mix suspense, intrigue, and amgibuity, the key ingredients of a good spy thriller.

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The Answer Is No by Fredrik Backman

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on December 1, 2024

Love is not for the selfish. Fortunately for Lucas, he is happy to be selfish and doesn’t care about being unloved. Lucas believes that “responsibility” and “commitment” are “two of the easiest ways of ruining any perfectly good day.” Lucas prefers to be free to do what he wants when he wants without considering the competing desires of other people. He also understands the danger of starting conversations. “If you ask people what they think, they start thinking, and that’s how wars start.”

Narrating “The Answer Is No,” Lucas tells the reader that there is something perfect about not having to share a pint of ice cream. He recommends “being really content with your life and not immediately thinking: Wow, now everything is really perfect, maybe we should have a baby?” Because a baby introduces another person in your life, and other people are the source of all unhappiness.

It's not that Lucas dislikes other people. He just has no need to interact with them. He appreciates the people who cook his pad thai and those who deliver it to his door, but he is happier if he doesn’t need to speak with them. To those who maintain that humans are herd animals who need to be together, he counters that “humans have historically proved to be in-need-of-therapy animals,” the need for therapy being triggered by keeping company with other humans.

Lucas likes to be left alone so he can drink wine and play video games. He feels sorry for people who want something to happen in their lives. Lucas “lives in an apartment, which he would consider the perfect form of storage for people, were it not for the great virus of civilization: neighbors.” His default response when a neighbor wants something is to tell them no.

Some of Lucas’ neighbors want him to help solve the mystery of a frying pan that a tenant discarded outside — almost on the sidewalk! — and Lucas has just managed to talk them into going away when his downstairs neighbor appears. She’s upset that he changed his internet password and is affronted when he accuses her of stealing his internet. It isn’t stealing, after all, if she only takes the little bit of the internet that leaks into her apartment.

Craziness ensues, primarily in the form of a large and ever-growing junk pile that originated with the frying pan, a committee of three crazy residents who place Lucas in charge of the pile, and a group of men who worship Lucas because they are convinced he is an angel. Eccentric people are Fredrik Backman’s bread and butter, the kind of people who make random comments like “I usually keep my peanuts next to a jar of peanut butter, so they understand what I’m capable of!” Other characters, like a woman who is hiding from an abusive husband by pretending to be in a coma, are more poignant. Backman also pokes fun at official and unofficial bureaucrats, protestors, middle managers, Facebook groups, and self-help advice.

Lucas might not be a reader’s ideal neighbor, but he sometimes expresses wise thoughts, including his recognition that some people are more interested in blaming and punishing people for the problems they cause (like a discarded frying pan) than in solving the problems (by, for example, picking up the frying pan). When the lone frying pan turns into a pile of trash (it’s easier to break the rules when someone else has paved the way), everyone in the neighborhood tries to guess at the culprits’ identities, “which somehow always seem to be people who don’t look like the people who are doing the guessing.”

Naturally, Lucas will feel himself making connections as the story progresses. He might despise himself for behaving socially, he might feel feverish as he comes down with a case of empathy, but working together with neighbors helps him solve some problems (although yes, other people are always the problem). But that doesn’t mean that Lucas needs to change his entire philosophy of life. His final plan to avoid responsibility and commitment is fitting and funny.

This is a short story, but sufficiently long — and sufficiently entertaining — that readers in need of a laugh might not feel bad about paying a couple of bucks to enjoy it.

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Happy Thanksgiving!