Case 001 || The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino Review

True devotion is reading this entire blog post from beginning to end.

Howdy y’all! Your favorite book blog just acquired a resident cryptid. My name’s Kathleen, and I mainly read fiction and mysteries. I’ll be primarily posting in a little corner I’ve affectionally named Mysteries for a Mercurial Mind (yes, I did get the idea from Morbid Mysteries of a Missing Millennium). Welcome to the first installment!

I was inspired to start posting here because I was writing all of this in a Goodreads review of The Devotion of Suspect X and realized that this was no longer just a review anymore. I’m not too sure what a random Wednesday made me want to suddenly write out my entire experience with reading, but life works in mysterious ways. If you only want the review for The Devotion of Suspect X, please skip to the section aptly title “The Actual Review of The Devotion of Suspect X” of this post.

I didn’t use to describe myself as an avid reader, and I hesitate even now to do so. Compared to some of my friends who’ve read dozens if not hundreds of books each year, I felt like I had become jaded in a way about reading after years of “assigned books”. (Meg does joke that she wishes she had met 8th-grade-me who loved trashy romances and everything fantasy.) I finally bought House of Leaves in April 2021. This would be my first book that wasn’t some required reading since middle school or maybe early high school.

The Postmodernism Delve (April 2021 – September 2023, actual start closer to January 2022)

It would take over a year to finish that book, more precisely 15 months. I would not recommend reading House of Leaves as your first introduction back into the literary world. Bad idea. I adore the book, but if you’ve ever even opened the book to a random page, you’d understand this sentiment. However, I would say that House of Leaves is a good representation of what my preferred style of book was back then­ – a spoonful of postmodernism, a hefty cup of unique literary structure, a sprinkle of psychedelic dreams, and just enough prétention™ to land it squarely in the category I like to call “I’m-not-like-other-books”. This would be nearly the only type of book I read for most of 2022 and 2023. Some notable books (and how long they took to read) include: S. (1 month), If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1 week), The New York Trilogy (2 weeks, I have beef with this book and I might re-read it to just write a better review of said beef), Cloud Atlas (3 months), and Invisible Cities (1 week). Then October 2023 came.

The Sherlockian Era (October 2023 – February 2024, but honestly still continuing)

Sherlock Holmes as a character had been on my radar for most of 2023 for the sole reason that my favorite video game Great Ace Attorney was essentially a love letter to Arthur Conan Doyle from the game developer. So, when I saw The Return of Sherlock Holmes sitting so pristinely on the shelves of a random used bookstore in Philadelphia, my interest was piqued, and I decided to purchase it. Thus, started the quick downfall into my Sherlockian Era.

I read all 56 short stories and 4 novels in 5 months, averaging a little over 2 weeks per collection. Throughout these five months, I’ve 1) fell in love with the iconic duo of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, 2) fumbled my way into Baker Street Irregulars Weekend, 3) fumbled further into monthly meetings of Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, 4) met a bunch of very cool Sherlockian, and 5) in a full circle moment, bought Great Ace Attorney for myself to go through all the references I missed the first time around. (If you would like to hear more about this era, I might publish all my journal entries about BSI weekend and all the various other cults literary societies in a future installment.)

The Great Purge (March 12, 2024)

After finishing all the Sherlock Holmes canon material, I decided to take a break from mysteries and go back to some old books that I was still in the middle of reading, mainly Life: A User’s Manual. I started reading this book over the summer of 2023. I put a pause on it to devote my time to Sherlock Holmes, and then picked it back up again at the start of this month. I tried for 12 whole days before I gave up on it for good. This would mark the second book I’ve ever DNF’d since the start of my new reading journey, the other one being Labyrinths. I think between a mediocre experience with the last book in the “I’m-not-like-other-books” genre I read Bina, followed by this behemoth of a book to try to get through (which was actually highly rated on Goodreads), I was just over the type of books that had started my reading journey. I was over subscribing to the prétention™. I was over not wanting to read because the current book I was on was too experimental and not enough plot. I was especially over trying to describe what types of books I read to whichever new stranger asked that question. And so came the Great Purge. Any postmodernist/literary fiction book that either had a low Goodreads rating or just sounded like I would be pulling my hair out to try to read, I just deleted off my want-to-read list on Goodreads. Now only 8 books remain, and I’m not particularly keen on reading those anytime soon, but each of those felt like a truly special experience so they remained.

Mysteries for a Mercurial Mind (March 2024 – Present)

As such begins the next rabbit hole in this adventure: Mysteries for a Mercurial Mind. Since I enjoyed all the Sherlock Holmes literature so much, I decided to do a little deep dive into the mystery genre. I started off with paying homage to what is widely considered as the first modern detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. I could definitely see where Arthur Conan Doyle’ Sherlock Holmes drew inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, and while it was a short and fun read, I desperately wanted to read more modern detective novels. Most of the books I was curious about had at least 2 weeks hold times on the library app, until I came across The Devotion of Suspect X while scrolling on a random subreddit.

The Actual Review of The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

I will admit that the book is published in 2005 and may not be seen as super recent to some people, but I consider anything post-2000 as recent enough considering I’ve been wading through 1800s to 1900s novels for so long. I’ll split most of my reviews into a no-spoiler review first, followed by a review that includes some spoiler, which will be clearly denoted. Finally, we move onto what some of you may have been looking for: the review.

The Devotion of Suspect X is much more than just a simple detective novel. Beyond having the normal tropes of a victim, a murderer, and a detective, the novel reads more as a character study. From the get-go, the reader is aware of how the murder went down and who all the involved parties are. From then on, Higashino oscillates between the guilty party and the detective team in a sort of dance in deduction as each side tries to achieve their end goals while thwarting the other. It was fascinating to be on both sides of the battle as I was more so used to trying to solve the mystery along with the detective, not already be in the know of who did it and how.

Another part I really enjoyed about this book that may be a niche interest is the amount of math analogies sprinkled throughout the story. The novel centers around this battle between two geniuses, one in math and one in physics, so they use metaphors such as the “P = NP” problem to illustrate the more abstract portions of getting away with murder. All this math talk gave me a lot of nostalgia for my days in math camp, right down to the feeling of barely understanding what’s being said but knowing that you’re in a room of people that are smarter than you could ever hope to be.

The ending of the novel and the point where the detectives finally solve the case are also written insanely well. I sat back in awe of the author’s masterful planning after I finished the book, to the point it kickstarted me to start writing reviews for books again after stopping for a bit, so I guess I have this book to thank for starting my blogger career.

My final thoughts are that I highly recommend this book to anyone who even remotely is interested in mysteries. It’s definitely an amazing read that I would be willing to read again (high praise coming from someone who does not re-read books), and I can see why it got nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel.

SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

I was f***ing mind blown by the revelation of what actually went down the night after the murder and who the body by the river actually belonged to. I don’t think this is the biggest plot twist that I’ve ever read on a factual plot basis, but if you consider the entire context of reading the novel, it is one of the biggest shocks I’ve had in a while.

A lot of horror games play on a “false sense of security” and achieve horrific effects by proving how wrong you were by assuming you were ever safe. The farce of “knowing what actually went down” really lulls you into this same false sense of security, and while I wasn’t “scared” by the farce being ripped away, I was horrified in a sense when I found out the truth. It made me physically start flipping back through the earlier chapters of the book to see what I missed and connect all the evidence together.

The ending was also emotional, albeit a little rushed in my opinion. Perhaps that is the feeling Higashino was trying to achieve, but I had just gotten my head wrapped around what actually happened when suddenly Yasuko gets proposed to, Misato attempts to commit suicide, Yasuko confesses, and Ishigami is screaming like a maniac. I guess this does mirror in a way the turmoil that Yasuko also went through during the same time. Throughout the book, I did keep questioning the title and specifically the usage of the word “devotion” but suddenly everything clicked in place as all of Ishigami’s planning and motive came into the light. “Devotion” would be the only word I feel justly encapsulates what happened.

My only actual gripe with the book is with this one quote: “Yasuko sighed. To Ishigami it sounded sexual, almost like a moan, and his heart fluttered.” Why did this scene have to be described in this way specifically.

Anyway, I’ve already summarized my final thoughts above, but I would like to thank anyone who decided to read through this long and rambling blog post. Hopefully, this is the first of many installments of Mysteries for a Mercurial Mind.