The Devotion of Suspect X
Minotaur Books · first published 2005 · 312 pages
A single mother's sudden trouble draws in her quiet neighbor, a math teacher, and then a physicist who helps the police.
Clear, patient chapters move like a chess game between two careful minds, and the human cost is never far from view.
For a night when sleep can wait.
About this book
Yasuko, a single mother who works at a Tokyo lunch shop, is visited one evening by her violent ex-husband, and that night changes everything. Her neighbor Ishigami, a lonely high-school math teacher, offers to help her through what follows. When a detective brings the case to his old friend Yukawa, a physicist who studied alongside Ishigami at university, a quiet contest of logic begins. What stays is a portrait of loneliness and of how far one person will go for another.