A brilliant Tokyo mathematician secretly longs for his beautiful neighbor. When he overhears her killing her brutal ex-husband in self-defense, he helps her to conceal the crime. Assigned to the case is Detective Kusanagi, who enlists the aid of Yukawa, a physics professor whose help he has previously solicited. The Holmesian Yukawa, however, is torn, as the mathematician is his old college friend. Higashino's mysteries are immensely popular in Japan, with several, including this one, adapted into films or TV dramas there. What might be classified as a procedural develops considerable psychological depth, aided by Tony Award-winning actor David Pittu's subtle, sensitive reading, through which he artfully manages to accentuate the characters' conflicted emotions. Recommended for crime novel enthusiasts and those interested in Japanese culture. [The Minotaur: St. Martin's hc, winner of Japan's prestigious Naoki Prize, also received a starred review, LJ 11/15/10.-Ed.]-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. Lib. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In this tightly plotted crime novel, Higashino pits a brilliant math teacher, Tetsuya Ishigami, against Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a shrewd physicist whose deductive prowess has earned him the nickname Detective Galileo. When Ishigami overhears his lovely neighbor, Yasuko Hanaoka, strangling her abusive ex-husband in the next apartment, he rushes to her aid. Smitten, he concocts a perfect, if complex, alibi for her. It's enough to mystify the investigating detective, but when Dr. Yukawa, the policeman's friend, begins his own sleuthing, and Yasuko falls in love with another man, both alibi and participants bend under the pressure. Even with its surprises and twists, the story unfolds in a manner more intellectually satisfying than emotionally gripping. But David Pittu's narration adds a humanity and passion to the proceedings, especially evident in the scenes in which Ishigami goes head to head with wily Dr. Yukawa. The former's calm manner of speaking seems to be concealing a feverishly working mind, while the doctor is evidently enjoying himself immensely. Pittu transforms those and other moments from mere wordplay into a thrilling game of cat and mouse in the Alfred Hitchcock tradition. A Minotaur hardcover. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A veteran police detective matches wits with a brilliant rookie criminal.Meticulous high-school math teacher Ishigami frequents the modest box-lunch shop Benten-tei because of his crush on Yasuko Hanaoka, a young mother who works there. Yonazawa and his wife Sayoko, who manage the shop, speculate regularly about Ishigami's visits, but Yasuko seems oblivious to his attention. Although she and her daughter Misato are Ishigami's apartment building neighbors, they've never spoken outside of the shop. One evening, Yasuko's abusive ex-husband Togashi surprises her at home. A fight ensues, and when Misato intervenes to help her mother, Togashi is killed. As the panicked Yasuko considers her options, Ishigami knocks on her door and takes charge, from disposing of the body to crafting alibis for them. Enter veteran detective Kusanagi and his brisk junior partner Kishitani, who examine the body, dumpednaked and wrapped in blue plastic in a factory district, its face bashed in. The inevitable discovery of the victim's identity leads to the pro forma questioning of both Yasuko and Ishigami. Kishitani is ready to dismiss them as suspects, but the veteran Kusanagi puts them on a mental back burner. Ishigami obsessively replays and adjusts his movements, using the murder to get close to Yasuko. When detective Manabu Yukawa, Ishigami's college rival, is added to the investigative team, it threatens to send him over the edge.This character-driven mystery by the prolific Higashino (Malice, 2009, etc.), one of only a few translated into English, has much to recommend it, including a droll Columbo-like sleuth and a great surprise ending.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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.--Moyer, Jessica Copyright 2010 Booklist

Andrew Taylor has written almost every kind of genre fiction, from village mysteries to psychological thrillers. But his mandarin style and eccentric imagination seem best suited to the historical crime novel. "An Unpardonable Crime" was a cunning facsimile of a 19th-century Gothic melodrama. "Bleeding Heart Square" caught the swoony sensationalism of a 1930s women's romance. Now THE ANATOMY OF GHOSTS (Hyperion, $24.99) pitches us into dynamic but rowdy 18th-century England, when superstition still held a grip on rational minds despite the advent of the Enlightenment. John Holdsworth, a London printer and bookseller whose wife falls prey to a medium claiming to be in touch with the spirit of their dead son, writes a book denouncing such charlatans. After his wife commits suicide and he is forced to sell his business, the embittered author of "The Anatomy of Ghosts" is in no position to turn down a commission from Lady Anne Oldershaw to travel up to Cambridge and talk some sense into her son, Frank, who believes he's being haunted by a friend's dead wife. Jerusalem College, where young Frank is enrolled as a student, comes to vivid life through the meticulously detailed routines observed by the students, the retinue of tutors who teach them Latin and the lackeys who collect their "scholarly manure" and otherwise exist to serve them. Since town officials have no authority inside this walled city-within-a-city, students are free to drink, gamble, abuse their servants and partake in the organized debauchery of hellfire societies like the Holy Ghost Club, where the ritual rape of a virgin customarily follows dessert. Frank's haunting dates from the night the virgin he was scheduled to ravish died a mysterious death - the same night the wife of the dissolute head of the Holy Ghost Club (who is himself "something of a personage at Jerusalem") drowned in a pond. As Taylor points out, "drowning ran like a watery thread through the whole sad affair." But so do other themes, like the clash between reason and humbug, and the power of grief and guilt to raise the dead. As a man ahead of his time, Holdsworth may be able to convince Frank that the ghost he sees is a figment of his "disordered fancy - born of too much laudanum, too much wine, too much unhappiness." But what is this pale figure rising from the mist? Anyone may be capable of murder, but only a mathematical genius can concoct a foolproof plan for getting away with it. That's the premise of THE DEVOTION OF SUSPECT X (Minotaur, $24. 99), Keigo Higashino's ingeniously plotted mystery about a math teacher who deduces that the neighbor he worships has murdered her abusive ex-husband and then calmly offers to help her escape the consequences. "Logical thinking will get us through this," Tetsuya Ishigami promises as he presents Yasuko Hanaoka and her daughter with detailed instructions on how to establish an alibi while he disposes of the corpse. The brilliance of this scheme can't be fully appreciated until the conclusion of the story, which has been translated from the Japanese into chilly English by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander. Meanwhile, unpredictable human variables keep forcing Ishigami to recalibrate his plan. There's the wealthy suitor who threatens to snatch his beloved Yasuko away from him, and the clever physicist, a friend of the detective investigating the case, who devises a counterplot for trapping the mathematician at his own game. And then there is Yasuko, who acknowledges her deep debt to her neighbor but may not be able to go through with the final step of his master plan. The taste for the macabre that accounts for the yuck factor in Mo Hayder's crime novels is curiously subdued in GONE (Atlantic Monthly, $24), lending credibility to this new assignment for Detective Inspector Jack Caffery of Bristol's Major Crime Investigation Unit and Sgt. Flea Marley, who heads up the Underwater Search Unit. This artfully constructed procedural opens with a car-jacking that becomes a kidnapping after the thief drives off with a little girl in the back seat. The narrative takes its first chilling turn when Caffery's team detects a pattern of other "accidental" kidnappings, indicating that the carjacker was stalking little girls all along. More shocks are in store, but for once the visceral thrills don't come at the expense of character. By giving her villain the intelligence to inflict as much emotional as physical pain, Hayder makes him less of a monster and more of a terror. "There was nothing soft or malleable or negotiable about her; she was simply her own solid core." You can trust Liza Marklund's description of her hard-nosed heroine, Annika Bengtzon, an investigative reporter on a Stockholm daily with the enviable freedom to write just about anything she well pleases. In RED WOLF (Atria, $25.99), the first novel in this series to be published in English (in a clear-cut translation by Neil Smith), Annika pleases to write about terrorism. Her research into an unsolved 1969 attack on a Swedish air force base not only triggers more violence from one of the original saboteurs but disrupts certain unholy alliances between government and big business. Despite her messy personal life, Bengtzon hangs on to the uncompromising ethics and sense of justice that make her a welcome figure in the ranks of Scandinavian sleuths. In the 18th-century England of Andrew Taylor's novel, superstition still holds a grip on rational minds.