A midsummer's equation - Book review

This is the fourth book on my Keigo Higashino series. Easily the longest of the four and setting wise quite different from any of the other three. I felt, “Devotion of Suspect X”, probably had the best translator and wish the same person had done the other three as well. The strain of translation is visible at places in this book though not as worse as “Name of the game is a kidnapping”, which was worse right from its title or “Malice”, which had its fair share of mistakes. The other aspect that was notably different in this book was the sheer number of characters. There is an army of them and trying to follow who does what is a tedious task in itself. In almost all the book, there is a leading lady character who is a hostess. Now that I think of, that’s the only profession they belong to on all the four books!! And a teacher character is a repeat across most of them. Probably the author has his own favorite of professions I guess.

Story wise, it’s one of the most detailed and circuitous one with a whole lot of drama related to environment thrown in. Based on the exchanges between the pro and anti-group, it is quite confusing what is the stand of the author – whether he is pro or against the movement to protect the sea. Probably it was intentional to leave the thinking to the readers. It all begins with a train ride by a kid to his uncle’s inn, wherein he meets amateur detective professional physicist Yukawa. The story then moves onto the details of debates and discussion on how a group of local residents are fighting against a big corporate from excavating their beach resources for rare earth elements. One fine morning, a corpse is found. Police suspect suicide and before they close the case, they identify the corpse as one of their own guys, a retired police officer and upon pressure from higher ups, they reopen the case. As the investigation unravels, it takes them back several years to another case which the dead cop was in charge of. How the murder that took place 3 decades earlier, which was actually solved by the cop, resulted in his death, which was initially believed to be suicide but later proved murder, forms the rest of the story.

In between, there are exchanges between the kid and the detective professor, how the latter helps him with his school work while solving crime in parallel, back story of the painting on the hotel which actually has a direct link to the murder mystery and a side story of adultery and love at the root of everything makes up for a really tedious read. Unlike other stories, the reason for murder is pretty muddled and with almost everyone having a role to play, more than whodunit, it becomes a tale of everyone did it.

Gils verdict – very long and tiring read. More of a mid afternoon yawn.