Japan’s best-selling crime novelist Keigo Higashino’s Salvation of a Saint is translated into English from Japanese by prolific author Alexander O. Smith and published by Minotaur Books in New York.
Yoshitaka who was about to leave his marriage and his wife due to their inability to have children, is poisoned by arsenic laced coffee and dies alone in his home. His wife, Ayane, is the logical suspect except for that she was hundreds of miles away at her parent’s when her soon to be ex-husband was murdered.
Add to that, she’s widely believed by friends and students to be a “saint” – an admirable and unflappable woman who accepts everything with a singular grace. The lead detective, Kusanagi, is immediately smitten with her and refuses to believe that she could have anything to do with the crime.
His assistant, however, Kaoru Utsumi, is convinced Ayane is guilty. While Utsumi’s instincts tell her one thing, the fact of the case are another matters. So she does what her boss has done for years when he was stymied – she calls upon Professor Manabu Yukawa.
But even the brilliant mind of Dr. Yukawa has trouble solving this one. In fact, the only possible solution that he has able to come to is one that is, by his own admission, actually possible only as theoretical construct, not in the actual, physical world.
Salvation of a Saint is Keigo Higashino at his mind-bending best, pitting emotion against fact in a beautifully plotted crime novel filled with twists and reverses that will astonish and surprise even the most attentive and jaded of readers.
Born in Osaka and currently living in Tokyo, Keigo Higashino is one of the most widely known and bestselling novelists in Japan. He is the winner of Edogawa Rampo Prize (for best mystery), the Mystery Writers of Japan, Inc. prize (for best mystery) and the prestigious Naoki Prize for The Devotion of Suspect X.
His novels have routinely topped the annual bestsellers lists, have been adapted more than a dozen times into movies or TV series, and translated widely throughout Asia.
Alexander O. Smith has translated a broad variety of novels, manga, and video games, for which he has been nominated for the Eisner Award, and won the ALA’s Batchelder Award (for his translation of Miyuki Miyabe’s Brave Story), and been recognized for his localizations of the video games Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. He lives with his family in Vermont.
Salvation of a Saint
By Keigo Higashino
Translated from the Japanese by Alexander O. Smith
Minotaur Books
Hardcover
978-0-312-60068-6
$24.99