Too bad I read it in January.
By the end of the first chapter, you will already know who did it and how. That's not why The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino is a compulsive page-turner. This is not a run of the mill whodunit nor an elaborately staged mystery. When you get to the end, when you race to the end, you'll slap your head like I did and realize how simple, but brilliant the story is.
"'...you science types all seem to say the same things.'
'What do you mean?'
'When I visited him, Ishigami said something a lot like what you said just now.' Kusanagi told his friend about Ishigami's mathematics test.
'Blind spots due to assumptions, eh? How like him.' Yukawa grinned. But the next moment, the physicist's expression changed. Suddenly he stood, and clutching his head in his hands, he walked over to the window...
'Hey, Yukawa?...'
'Impossible," Yukawa muttered. 'There's no way he could have...'"
So there's a little bit of science and math in here - after all, a physicist and mathematician are pitted against one another. But it's not some DaVinci Code with math or anything like that. The premise is that the murder has been laid out by Ishigami much like a mathematical proof, luring the police detectives and the physicist into solving it the way he would want them to - but that's all I'm going to say because I don't want to divulge too much.
I'm not sure if I've ever read a book where I rooted for the "bad guys" as much as I did here. But that's just the thing - the murderer and her unexpected accomplice aren't evil at all; they were just caught in an impossible situation. Will they get away with it or will the suspicious physicist figure it all out?
With every twist and turn, I dreaded that they would get caught, but astonished at the outcome of events. I thought I knew what the big surprise was but I gasped when I reached the last chapter. Of course, some of the incidental math & science scenes went way over my head, so maybe I was too dim to see it.