Newcomer by Kiego Higashino

Newcomer by Kiego Higashino

Book review

Genre- fiction thriller

Spoiler- it is a murder mystery so the most obvious spoiler of whodunit is not revealed!

Rating- 3/5 (only because I am comparing this to his earlier work like devotion of suspect X!)

Kiego Higashino is an unpredictable writer with his stories having more twists than a snake caught in a tsunami!

But unlike his counter part Murakami, in the end you will get the answers to all the puzzles and everything falls into place however jumbled they were in the beginning! While in Murakami you know to expect the opposite!

So while you know the killer quite early in devotion of suspect X or Malice or Salvation of a saint; in those the novel is then about how and why!

Then again you have journey under midnight sun or name of game is kidnapping or even a midsummers equation it is a typical murder mystery with the killer only revealed in the end with twists galore! This one is like that!

In any whodunit I have always noted that the person who is the least likely to kill is the killer! In many other novels I have been able to crack the code using this logic but Kiego gets me stumped all the time!

It of course does not help that the Japanese names are a mystery to me even now! They sound so similar and gender neutral that I had to go back and forth multiple number of times! So it’s a good thing that Kiego has given a list of characters in the beginning!

You must understand though that some magic will be lost in translation and this new novel took its own sweet time to come!
In fact there are so many novels written by Kiego waiting to be translated into English!

We have a newcomer detective here and the way this guy goes piece by piece enquiring about the murder is too good! Every chapter can be a complete independent story in itself with the final ones issuing the links between the characters and story flow and the murder!

Like I mentioned before you will not be able to guess the killer that easily!

The attention to details such as the jackets worn by people and the food taken and the articles purchased and their final importance has been dealt beautifully!

All in all a good read but it is a big problem when you have a murder mystery in your hands and you have to go through 300 odd pages to get to the point literally! Lately though this has been the trend with John Grisham and Theo, Jeffrey Deaver and his new series to name a few!

Since this was an eagerly anticipated book am sure the Kiego regulars will grab this with both hands! I am in that club so there!…

For others if you are reading Kiego for the first time then start with this and end with devotion which is literally the ranking!
Murakami fans may not like the answers since they are there!

Newcomer is brand new!