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One of Japan’s best-selling crime novelists makes his American debut in an atmospheric thriller about a desperate woman, Yasuko, who, craving a peacefull life with her daughter, Misato, kills her abusive lout of an ex-husband. The next-door neighbor, Ishigami, helps hide the body and improvises a cover-up. When the body is eventually found, however, determined investigator Kusanagi, with the help of Dr. Yukawa, a physicist who knew Ishigami in college, senses that something is amiss with Yasuko’s story. A cat-and-mouse, Dostoevsky-like investigation ensues. Higashino explores just how far a relationship built on a terrible event can last. Suggest to readers familiar with Natsuo Kirino (Real World, 2008), another Japanese master of psychological crime fiction, and Karin Fossum, whose Norway-set thrillers are also drenched in psychological terror. --Jessica Moyer

Review

“Higashino won Japan’s Naoki Prize for Best Novel with this stunning thriller about miscarried human devotion, a bestseller in Japan. The author successfully combines unquestionable reasoning with unquenchable pain. In this brutally laconic translation, cold logic battles warm hearts throughout this elegant proof of the wages of sin, in which everyone suffers and no one can ever win.” --_Publishers Weekly _(starred review)

«Winner of Japan’s prestigious Naoki Prize and a bestseller there with more than two million copies sold, this literary psychological thriller is a subtle and shifting murder mystery. It will make readers redefine devotion and trust in an otherwise complete stranger.” --_Library Journal (_starred review)

“Veteran police detective matches wits with a brilliant rookie criminal. This character-driven mystery by the prolific Higashino has much to recommend, including a droll Columbo-like sleuth and a great surprise ending.” --_Kirkus Reviews _(starred review)

«In The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino weaves a web of intellectual gamesmanship in which the truth is a weapon that leads both police and readers astray. The ingenius conclusion is so unexpected that it's difficult to imagine anyone seeing it coming. Smart, smart characters.» --Jaqueline Winspear

«How could we have ever imagined, without the help of a novel like this, that Japanese life could be so fraught with suffering and so entertaining all at once?” --Alan Cheuse, Dallas Morning News on _HIMITSU (The Secret_), published as NAOKO in the U.S.

“Higashino is a deft conjurer of human relationships, and while this is first and foremost a tale of grief— —he infuses it with spasms of sharp humor.” --_East Bay Express_ on Himitsu (_The Secret_)

“_The Devotion of Suspect X_ has all the brilliant intricacy of the best Golden Age mysteries – puzzle within puzzle, twist after twist – with a modern sensibility. It is a wonderful, fresh take on the classic mystery's intellectual struggle between protagonist and antagonist, adds to it all the right amounts of tension and pacing, places it in a fascinating setting, and gives of all of this plenty of heart.» --Jan Burke, New York_ Times_ bestselling and Edgar Award winning author of Kidnapped and Bones

«Japanese crime writers excel at many things: one is the slow tightening of the noose that's at the fast-pounding heart of the police procedural. The Devotion of Suspect X is a terrific book in that tradition and it's about time American readers got a crack at it.» --SJ Rozan, Edgar Award winning author of Winter and Night and On the Line

“The Devotion of Suspect X is elegant and spare and gripping and vivid. Most of all, however, it is deeply moving, and this is what sets it apart!” --Jesse Kellerman, bestselling author of Trouble and The Executor

«Irresistible! A mind-twisting story that will have readers plunging in to try to solve the crime before the math genius, the physics professor, or the cop get there first.» --Nancy Pickard, New York_ Times_ bestselling author of The Scent of Rain and Lightning and The Virgin of Small Plains

Salvation of a Saint