Book Review: DETECTIVE GALILEO SERIES (Keigo Higashino)
Let me sum it up with a sentence I exclaimed when I finished the trilogy: I WAS DONE. THE STORY WAS CRAZY!
Well, it’s not that I have read Keigo Higashino’s books in order. I started with the second book, Salvation of a Saint, which was borrowed by my sister from her school library. It intrigued me so much that I was very curious about the first book, The Devotion of Suspect X. And that led me to the last book, A Midsummer’s Equation. The story didn’t correlate to one another except it used the same lead character, Manabu Yukawa, the said Detective Galileo of the series.
If I was asked which book was the best, Salvation of a Saint made it. It caught me to read the whole book without any stop just by passing through a few pages in the first chapter. This really got me a thing that an opening chapter of a book is very important. We were brought to the point of view where we already knew the murderer but didn’t know how. The first few pages showed in Mashiba Ayane’s point of view that she had a grudge when her husband said about their divorce because Ayane couldn’t give him a child after a year of marriage. It was all about love, betrayal, and a woman’s patience (the type of scary patience, I think). Mashiba Ayane was out there in her parents’ house in Hokkaido when Yoshitaka was murdered. How could a faraway wife kill her husband without a lack of her alibi? The only question to keep me urging. The story got very interesting when a charged detective for this case, Kusanagi, sympathized with the suspect, Ayane. In fact, she was happened to be the murderer of her husband yet also the savior of her own death trap toward her husband before the murder moment. Think about that, what a strange position someone can be in, right?
The Devotion of Suspect X was no doubt a success. Besides, it gave us a different point of view than Salvation of the Saint. At first, the readers were put a step ahead by knowing the truth more than the detectives in the story. It told us about Tetsuya Ishigami, a mathematic genius (a high school teacher), who covered a murder committed by his neighbor, Yasuko Hanaoka, because he had a deep, unspoken love toward her. Ishigami was amazing, I certainly had to state that, despite his love might be quite wild. His trick to obscure the murder committed by Yasuko was giving us an impression: In order to cover a lie (perfectly), you have to make another fact. He depicted a character of a genius who didn’t crave a title or honor, which was not the essence of mastering mathematics. That was why he chose to be a high school teacher when he had the potential to be a professor in a respected university. Another favorite impression from Tetsuya Ishigami was that he didn’t mind if he was jailed as long as he was allowed to have paper and pen. Even if he didn’t have them, he still had his mind, and no one could stop his mind from thinking. It was what he craved to do, the real essence of mathematics, that could be proved by finishing an equation that only he could solve. He felt every second of his life was precious and it was a shame if he would see other people solving it when he was alive. He planned to spend his time in jail to work on it. My only question that stays unanswered until the end: who was the father of Misato Hanaoka? When Yasuko Hanaoka was married to the victim (Shinji Togashi), it was said that Togashi was already a stepfather. So, who was her real father?
The last book, A Midsummer’s Equation, was way more complicated than the two books earlier. It took more places to explore, more people to be involved, and more cases to be solved. It took place in Tokyo and Hari Cove with many detailed names of the district. The victim happened to be also a detective, a retired Tokyo detective, who tried to deliver a message from a father to a separated daughter. Manabu Yukawa played a great role here. His physicist side stands out as dominant as his detective side. We also have an interesting character joining the trilogy, a Tokyo teenager named Kyohei who spent his holiday at his uncle’s inn at Hari Cove. That was a plot twist, a real plot twist, right before the ending.
Apparently, because of the complexity, the murderer didn’t get proper punishment in the end. That was because the murders were committed by the children and the grownups were covering them so they could save their children’s lives. Keigo Higashino also brought this theme in Devotion of Suspect X, in which Misato killed her stepfather. Even so, I would like to say it is still a perfect ending for the story, with a closing line that would be my favorite part either. Manabu Yukawa was giving advice toward Kyohei. Kyohei was about to ask questions to the professor when the professor said to keep those questions and find the answers later as he grew up. The professor also added that he also had the same questions and worried about the answers too. He said Kyohei was not alone in finding them.
My other favorite quote from Manabu Yukawa, stated in the last book:
“There are some mysteries in this world, that cannot be unraveled with modern science. However, as science develops, we will one day be able to understand them. The question is, is there a limit to what science can know? If so, what creates that limit?”
“People do. People’s brains, to be more precise.”