When the body of Ryota Uetsuji is fished out of the Tokyo Bay with a bullet in his back, his live-in girlfriend, Sonoka Shimauchi, becomes suspect number one. But there's a problem with that theory: Sonoka was out of town, traveling in Kyoto with a friend, at the time of the murder. Such is the conundrum at the heart of the twisty Invisible Helix by Edgar Award-nominated Keigo Higashino (Malice; A Midsummer's Equation), translated from the Japanese by Giles Murray.
Tokyo Metropolitan Police Chief Inspector Kusanagi and his team are further confounded when Sonoka goes on the run with the help of an older woman who's considered a family friend. Why would Sonoka flee when she has a solid alibi? To help unravel the puzzle, Kusanagi brings in his old friend and occasional police consultant, Manabu Yukawa, a physics professor known as Detective Galileo for his sharp deductive skills. Yukawa discovers that some of the case's characters are connected by events reaching back decades, and they will go to great lengths to protect those they love.
In this fifth Detective Galileo mystery, Yukawa remains as brilliant as ever, but readers also get glimpses into a more vulnerable side of the usually inscrutable professor. A case that at first seems only mildly curious to him piques his interest when it seems to have links to Yukawa's own past. Baked into the DNA of Higashino's novels is the equal import the author gives to the motivations of the characters and the resolution of the central mystery. As a result, Invisible Helix is a carefully woven treatise on guilt, betrayal, and the definition of family. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, reviewer and freelance editor at The Edit Ninja