It was supposed to be another mundane case for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, but when a man dies from drinking poison with his wife and prime suspect hundreds of miles away, detectives Shunpei Kusanagi and Kaoru Utsumi have to prove that the perfect crime was not all that perfect…
Cut to Osaka, Japan, in the mid-2000s. Author Keigo Higashino is trying to write the follow-up to his first novel in his Detective Galileo series, “Yōgisha X no Kenshin” (The Devotion of Suspect X). After reinventing the murder mystery genre with his first book, Higashino had to find a way to clear the bar he set.
Originally published in Japan as “Seijo no Kyūsai” in 2008, it was not until 2012 that the novel was translated into English and published as “Salvation of a Saint.” It reuses the two major characters of Kusanagi and physics professor Manabu Yukawa, who is the titular Detective Galileo from “Devotion,” but otherwise is unattached to the plot of the previous case. You may be wondering why I chose to review the sequel instead of the original, and I can promise you that all will be revealed in due time.

Plot
We enter the story with an argument between Yoshitaka and Ayane Mashiba, who are about to get a divorce. Ayane decides to spend some time in her hometown of Sapporo to get away and leaves Yoshitaka alone in Tokyo. A few days after Ayane’s departure, Yoshitaka dies from arsenic poisoning. When the Tokyo Metropolitan Police investigate Yoshitaka’s death, they rule that it was a homicide and that somebody had poisoned his coffee. Ayane is the first person suspected of killing Yoshitaka, but how could she have poisoned his coffee when she was over 700 miles away?
Detectives Kusanagi and Utsumi are put on the case to solve not just who poisoned Yoshitaka but how they did it without leaving a trace of how the arsenic got into the coffee. As the investigation progresses, Kusanagi starts developing affections toward Ayane and starts steering the investigation away from her and towards any other potential suspect. Utsumi decides to break away from her partner and looks toward Imperial University professor Yukawa, a friend of Kusanagi’s and an occasional consultant for his cases, to help her prove that Ayane was the one to murder her husband. Across their three separate investigations, they learn not just who killed Yoshitaka but also how they did it and what led them to wanting him dead in the first place.
Higashino’s style
With your standard murder mystery, the questions of how and why always come up, but they are almost always supplements to the larger question of who committed the crime. However, Higashino writes his murder mysteries in a way that puts the who all the way back to the trunk and puts the how and why in front of the wheel. In “Salvation,” Higashino gives the reader at most two chapters to wonder who killed Yoshitaka before showing his hand. However, he manages to keep readers enthralled in the story for the remaining 31 chapters by making them question how the killer accomplished their task and what their motive was in killing Yoshitaka.
Another way Higashino’s writing shines is in the case of him writing a story ingrained in the hardships of women who live in a world built from misogyny. This theme is reflected in both the murderer’s motive behind killing Yoshitaka as well as Utsumi’s constant desire to prove to Kusanagi and their associates that a woman’s intuition can help solve the case and should not be cast aside because it is not concrete evidence. The addition of Utsumi in “Salvation” helps create an extra layer of depth to its story and gives the case that stands at the center of the story a lot more weight. Whereas Yukawa is a foil to Kusanagi in that he is constantly outsmarting the detective, showing that his ability to gather information can sometimes get him nowhere, Utsumi is a foil to Kusanagi in that she challenges him and the way that he thinks about the cases, showing him that the way he looks at information to solve the case can sometimes point him in the wrong direction.

Final thoughts
Now, why did I review “Salvation” over “Devotion?” While both showcase Higashino’s ability to reinvent the murder mystery genre, there are some things that “Salvation” has that I really like that are not present in “Devotion.” The first novel works similarly to the second, where a murder occurs, the reader is told who did it within the first few chapters, and they spend the rest of the book seeing if Yukawa and company can solve it. However, “Devotion” is driven primarily by the battle of wits between Yukawa and its main antagonist, akin to Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty, who is trying to create the perfect alibi. “Salvation,” however, is more focused on why the murderer wanted Yoshitaka dead and their attempt to commit the perfect crime.
If you are a fan of murder mysteries, character-driven stories or watching misogynists getting put in their place, I cannot recommend this book enough, as well as the rest of the “Detective Galileo” series. There are six books in total at the time of publishing, with all but “Kindan no Majutsu” (“The Forbidden Magic”) being translated to English as recently as last year. “Salvation of a Saint” is an amazing ride from start to finish, with a method for murder so crazy that it helps put a twist on the murder mystery genre. Higashino may have just pulled off the perfect crime novel, but I will let you be the judge of that.