Newcomer
A Mystery
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4.2 • 90 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
* A New York Times Editor's Choice *
"Part Sherlock Holmes, part Harry Bosch, Higashino's hero is a quietly majestic force to be reckoned with." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
International bestseller Keigo Higashino returns with his latest mindbender—Newcomer—as newly transferred Tokyo Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga is assigned to a baffling murder.
Detective Kyochiro Kaga of the Tokyo Police Department has just been transferred to a new precinct in the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo. Newly arrived, but with a great deal of experience, Kaga is promptly assigned to the team investigating the murder of a woman. But the more he investigates, the greater number of potential suspects emerges. It isn’t long before it seems nearly all the people living and working in the business district of Nihonbashi have a motive for murder. To prevent the murderer from eluding justice, Kaga must unravel all the secrets surrounding a complicated life. Buried somewhere in the woman’s past, in her family history, and the last few days of her life is the clue that will lead to the murderer.
From the international bestseller Keigo Higashino, author of The Devotion of Suspect X, comes one of his finest works of crime fiction yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Higashino's satisfying second novel featuring Kyoichiro Kaga to be published in English (after 2014's Malice), the Columbo-like Tokyo police detective pursues loose ends in the case of the strangulation murder of Mineko Mitsui, a divorcee estranged from her only child, whose friends insisted that "she was the last person on earth to have enemies." Kaga believes that his responsibilities as a homicide investigator extend to finding ways to comfort those traumatized by violent crime. He begins with a family that runs a store that sells rice crackers to ascertain whether an insurance salesman who claimed he was in Mineko's apartment shortly before her death on business had an alibi. Other threads include the identity of the person who bought an assortment of pastries found at the scene of the crime, and why the dead woman purchased an expensive pair of kitchen scissors. Although the solution is less elaborate than those in the author's Detective Galileo novels, the end result is a police procedural puzzle mystery that comes across as more realistic.
Customer Reviews
A mesmerizing layer cake of a crime story…
To quote one of the characters of this book : “I can’t believe that so many other things were going on in the background of this case.” Higashino-san has created a brilliant yet humane character in Detective Kaga Kyochiro, and ‘Newcomer’ is a perfect showcase of this.
Behind a murder case, there are a series of interesting human-interest stories around the denizens of this novel, and the thin red line connecting all those stories has created a believable world where the characters are pushed to recognize their nature by the detective, who is sometimes portrayed as goofy and unorthodox investigator.
Highly recommenced.