Capsule reviews.

Keigo Higashino, Kay Francis, Katie Williams

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The “Detective Galileo” mystery novels (Keigo Higashino, 2011–2021)

By many standards, these novels are not good, exactly. They’re classic page-turners, but without the kind of literary ambition you find in, say, Tana French. The writing (at least in translation) is serviceable but mechanical. The characters more or less come down to having one distinguishing quirk (if that) but are mostly just excuses for the mysteries to happen.

And the solutions to the mysteries—particularly after the first book, The Devotion of Suspect X, which is a bit different from the other three—are so complicated they really give up any pretense of being something a person would ever do. I wrote “a normal person” initially, but honestly, any person, abnormal or not, would not do these things. Rube Goldberg would write these murder schemes off as needlessly complex. I’m not going to give any of them away here but they are truly ridiculous, ridiculous murders.

All that said, I love them. I’m not reall…