When Osamu Nonoguchi went to call on his friend,
successful author Kunihiko Hidaka, he noticed a woman in
Hidaka's garden; she said the writer had poisoned her
cat, which startled Nonoguchi. Shortly after going back
home, Nonoguchi receives a phone call from Hidaka who
says he has something important to talk about and to come
visit him at 8 o'clock that same evening. Hidaka says he
will be writing alone at home; his wife is at a hotel as
they will be leaving for Canada in a few days' time. But
when Nonoguchi arrives at Hidaka's home, he finds the
house dark; he's worried so he calls Hidaka's wife. She
arrives within half an hour and they go inside together.
That's when they find Hidaka dead; he was murdered. The
detective on the case is Kyochiro Kaga, who was an old
school mate of Nonoguchi's, and both were teachers at the
same school for a while; is it a coincidence?
MALICE is a mostly a police procedural but with a twist:
the chapters alternate between Detective Kaga's
investigation and Nonoguchi's account of the events. I
thought it might be confusing, but it definitely isn't;
both points of view flow seamlessly into a very
captivating murder mystery and it proves quite
interesting to see things from both men's sides. MALICE is
not precisely a whodunit, but rather finding why the
murder happened, and getting there is enthralling. The
main characters, Nonoguchi and Kaga, are fascinating, as
are their interactions with each other.
A good part of MALICE delves into the past, and although
I am not usually a fan of this literary trick, it works
extraordinarily well here; never has reading why a murder
was committed been so thrilling! We get the feel of Japan
as if we were natives, and yet it's very comfortable. The
story is tightly plotted, there are very clever plot
twists, the writing is superb, and the translation is
flawless. I enjoyed MALICE a lot and I'm very much
looking forward to further adventures featuring Detective
Kaga!
Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found
brutally murdered in his home on the night before he’s
planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His
body is found in his office, a locked room, within his
locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of
whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems.
At the crime scene, Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga
recognizes Hidaka’s best friend, Osamu Nonoguchi. Years
ago when they were both teachers, they were colleagues at
the same public school. Kaga went on to join the police
force while Nonoguchi eventually left to become a full-
time writer, though with not nearly the success of his
friend Hidaka.
As Kaga investigates, he eventually uncovers evidence that
indicates that the two writers’ relationship was very
different that they claimed, that they were anything but
best friends. But the question before Kaga isn't
necessarily who, or how, but why. In a brilliantly
realized tale of cat and mouse, the detective and the
killer battle over the truth of the past and how events
that led to the murder really unfolded. And if Kaga isn't
able to uncover and prove why the murder was committed,
then the truth may never come out.
Malice is one of the bestselling—the most acclaimed—novel
in Keigo Higashino’s series featuring police detective
Kyochiro Kaga, one of the most popular creations of the
bestselling novelist in Asia.
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