‘It’s your willingness to explore blind alleys, that’s what decides the outcome of a case’

A real page turner right from the beginning! So much so that I read the whole thing in one day!

A steady, methodical investigation that connects the detective's past with his present. What is the significance of the list of 12 bridges and their corresponding months, found in two separate places? One in Kaga’s mother’s possessions, and one in the apartment of a murdered man. And how many individuals are actually involved in all of this? It's a heck of a puzzle, one that Detective Kaga pieces together slowly and expertly. And once he discovers the thread that ties everything together, he unravels it with amazing precision! I really enjoyed this, as I have all of the books in this series! I hope that there are more to come! ( )

I am aghast and heartbroken that there is no more Detective Kaga.
Now, on to the book. It starts with the innocent death of a woman who left her family. It turned out she was Detective Kaga's mother. Ten years pass, then another death takes place. Detective Kaga is not assigned the case but gets involved.
Keigo Higashimo layers the book with impossible but logical connections. You guess the end but don't know how Detective Kaga solves the case. There is one final twist at the end, something unexpected.
The book proceeds at a slow, leisurely pace but draws you in.
As in all of his books, once you start reading, a strange force impels you to keep reading till the end. At the end, you heave a sigh of satisfaction.
In this case, disappointment. No more Detective Kaga: it makes you want to weep. ( )

This is a well done police procedural set in Japan. There are many twists and turns in the plot that make it an engaging read. The characters are nuanced and the story moves along despite there not being much actual action. Most of the narrative consists of detective interviews. The many Japanese names are a bit of a challenge for an English speaker and the settings are not particularly evokative. The resolution was a totally satisfying surprise. ( )

This is a fairly interesting book. In essence it's a police procedural, but set in Japan. It was originally written in Japanese. It follows people's lives over a period of about thirty years, from troubled childhoods to the "present day". In some rather strange ways lives of several disparate people become entangled.

A young woman is found strangled, and near by, a seeming derelict has been burned up in his little shack. Are they related? Inspector Kyoichiro Kaga seems to think so and he and his cousin, Shuhei Matsumiya, work to find the relating threads. One thread leads to a famous actress, now playwright and director, Hiromi Kadokura. I won't go into the story further, suffice to say, things are somewhat of a tangled mess, and it takes quite some time and clever pondering to unravel them.

One problem this book has is that it doesn't appear to be very well written. I don't know if the problem is with the original writing in Japanese or with the translation. It is also true, of course, that one won't get the same quality of writing when reading Mickey Spillane or Dennis Lehane than one gets from reading Willa Cather, Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens, but this didn't even seem up to the low standards of Lehane. I've read quite a number of Japanese books in translation, virtually all of Murakami along with selections from Kenzaburo Oe, Junichiro Tanizaki, Masuji Ibuse, Yasunari Kawabata, Natsuma Soseki, and one or two others. I never noticed slightly stilted or slightly "off" writing in any of these other authors, but in this book, the writing was wooden, and a number of the idiomatic phrases seemed somewhat inapt for the context. But, if you can get past the infelicitous writing, the story can be rather gripping in places.

Because of the writing issues, the book is more properly rated at 3* rather than 4*, but GoodReads won't allow such a distinction.

#TheFinalCurtain #NetGalley
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This is a convoluted story of people hiding from debt collectors, their families, and their pasts and of the lengths they will go to remain hidden. A son is given his mother's ashes. She left when he was a child and as he looks into a memorial service for her, he tries to find the man she had been with in the years before her death, but the man could not be found, the name he used was not the one he had been born with. Meanwhile, a body is found in remnants of a makeshift shelter that had be set on fire. Who was the homeless man and why was it so difficult to establish his identity. And did his death have anything to do with the body of a woman from out of town found in sparsely furnished cheap accommodations that were not hers?

This installment in the series of police procedurals centered on Kyo Kaga is, once again, focused on the thoroughness of the Tokyo detectives, as they painstakingly chase down the smallest of leads. The pleasure of this series lies in how carefully the detectives work, how no loose ends are left, and how solving a crime does depend on insight and intuition, but mostly on footwork and careful attention to detail. There's a through line of people having things happen to them that put them outside of ordinary society and how they make their way. This novel provides some interesting insight into how Japanese society functions, but the real draw is the quietly charismatic detective Kago. ( )