Higashino’s fabled Tokyo Metropolitan Police detective, Kyoichiro Kaga, he of the 'razor-sharp mind and bloodhound nature,' has been dispatched to the Nihonbashi precinct to investigate the inexplicable murder of a middle-aged woman who lived alone and seemed to have no enemies ... The characters, it must be said, are thinner than the dough used to create those delicate pastries; but in a fair exchange, the author has succeeded in making problem-solving logistics sexy.
Unorthodox Tokyo detective Kyoichiro Kaga has been reassigned to the Nihonbashi precinct and is still acquainting himself with the quaint premodern neighborhood when another newcomer, Mineko Mitsui, is found strangled in her apartment. The savvy killer has left no trace of himself, leaving Kaga and the lead detective, Uesugi, to mine clues from the inconsistencies of Mineko’s last day ... Kaga’s second investigation is a cerebral puzzler’s delight that,...offers a thought-provoking take on the tension between modernity and traditional culture and leaves a trail of mended relationships in its wake.
Though murder is no laughing matter, Kaga remains a delightful character in Keigo Hagashino's Newcomer, the second book in the Kaga series ... Newcomer's structure calls to mind a Robert Altman movie, each chapter spotlighting a different set of characters in a story that can stand alone; intertwined, they present a complete picture that provides the solution to the case ... Fans of classic whodunits should introduce themselves to this newcomer immediately.
...As author Higashino describes Kaga’s incursion into the lives he finds at each of the street’s small shops, he seems to be crafting a chain of tiny, gemlike short stories—until the tales start intersecting, scaffolding on one another, and eventually creating a bridge between the lives of the longtime residents of Kodenmacho and the death of a woman who, for her own private reasons, chose to live in this obscure quarter of one of the world’s busiest cities ... Part Sherlock Holmes, part Harry Bosch, Higashino’s hero is a quietly majestic force to be reckoned with. Here’s hoping his demotion continues to bring him to the attention of readers from East to West.
To the author’s great credit, the individual tales stand strong one after another, and the accumulating storyline gains momentum and weight in the process. Structure and character ultimately intertwine nicely with Kaga as the supporting person who connects each tale ... By the end of the journey, Kaga discovers who killed Mineko Mitsui (of course). But the murder, despite being the most serious crime of the book, ironically seems the most mundane in its solution. More fascinating is the detective who brings all the stories together, helps fill them with such intimacy and warmth, and eases the people of Nihonbashi toward their small moments of grace or atonement or relief — not simply with a sense of questions answered, but with some higher order restored, with humanity itself reaffirmed.
It has become a cliché, but attention to detail is a characteristic of so many areas of Japanese creativity – martial arts, gardening, classical music, wood block printing, computer game design… We can add crime fiction to the list. Although there are no car chases, gunfights or explosions, when the violence happens it seems perfectly real, well weighted and resonates across everything you’ve learned about the victim and the other characters in the novel. New, inventive, different – we should be reading more Japanese crime fiction.
Newcomer will appeal most to fans of classic detective stories by the likes of Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon. Higashino’s intricate plotting and a vivid setting come together in an absorbing mystery that will leave readers guessing until the very end.
I really enjoy Higashino’s smart plotting in his previous works like The Devotion of Suspect X and Malice. Newcomer is just as clever, with the structure itself leading to so many red herrings.
In Higashino’s satisfying second novel featuring Kyoichiro Kaga to be published in English, 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.' ... the...result is a police procedural puzzle mystery that comes across as more realistic.
