Malice

Bestselling author Kunihiko Hidaka is murdered in his home the night before he is due to leave the country. The body is discovered by his newlywed wife and his old school friend and fellow writer, Osamu Nonoguchi. Inspector Kyoichiro Kaga takes over the investigation and soon, working from clues at the scene and Nonoguchi's notes, identifies the killer and makes an arrest. The murderer confesses fully and even shows a "death-wish" attitude; the case and its method are unremarkable, and it seems ready to be closed. Yet Kaga is not satisfied with the result. The killer remains vague about his motive, and each confession contradicts the last—an abnormality Kaga cannot let go of. Unwilling to wrap things up hastily, he interviews a wide circle of old acquaintances of both victim and killer and digs into their upbringings and the details of their relationship. As the investigation proceeds layer by layer, what emerges behind the case is no longer a rational reason for murder, but a resentment in one person's heart so deep that even he cannot explain it. Keigo Higashino uses an alternating narrative structure of personal notes and police records, with documents that dismantle and rebuild one another, constantly overturning the reader's judgment: the killer is identified early, and the real question is "why kill." The novel shifts the puzzle from "who did it" to "why it happened this way," revealing the buried darkness of human nature through layer upon layer of reversal. Along with Journey Under the Midnight Sun, The Devotion of Suspect X, and The Miracles of the Namiya General Store, it is counted among Higashino's four great works, and it is an important novel in the Kyoichiro Kaga series.