What an appropriate name for a murder mystery. As the Tokyo police hunt for the killer of an man found floating in Tokyo Bay, they must trace relationships back for generations. Not all the relationships are what they appear to be, and not all the relationships bear on the case at hand.
Its fun to try to stay a step ahead of detectives Kusanagi and Utsami, and their reluctant consultant "Detective Galileo" as they uncover secrets, and possibly conceal secrets from each other.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Did Sunoko kill her boyfriend? And where has she gone? Those are the two questions that the Tokyo Murder Squad must answer and they enlist the help of physicist Manabu Yukawa, known as "Detective Galileo" because of a tenuous connection between them. This latest in the series will work as a standalone but fans of the series might find it less engaging that previous installments. It's slow, painfully so in spots and I found the relations between all of the women somewhat confusing albeit as it turns out, critical to the case. There are some intriguing spots and it's very twisty but it's hard to care about the characters. No spoilers from me. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. I've enjoyed Higashino's work in the past and I'm optimistic about future novels from this and other series that he writes.

Book Review: Invisible Helix, Detective Galileo #10, by Keigo Higashino, Giles Murray (Translator)
Published by St. Martin's Press and Minotaur Books, December 17, 2024

★★★★★ (4.5 Stars rounded up!)

"Invisible Helix" (2024) by Keigo Higashino is the 10th and final book of his "Detective Galileo" series (1998-2021). It is the 5th book of the series translated into English and published by St. Martin's Press and Minotaur Books, - huge gratis indeed to Macmillan.

First published in Japan in 2021, 透明な 螺旋 (Tōmei na Rasen Rasen), Invisible Helix, features Higashino's protagonist, research physicist and fictional Teito University professor, Manabu Yukawa, also known as "Detective Galileo", working on, - and often bringing to conclusion, the cases of the Homicide Division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headed by Chief Inspector Kusanagi. Loosely comparable perhaps to Jonathan Kellerman's long-running psychological and police procedural series featuring psychologist Alex Delaware working with LAPD homicide Detective Lieutenant Milo Sturgis, though certainly in different worlds.

// "Invisible Helix" (2024), Detective Galileo #10, by Keigo Higashino, Giles Murray (Translator)
Original version "透明な 螺旋 (Tōmei na Rasen Rasen)" published in Japan in 2021 //

Detective Galileo comes to the rescue when the Tokyo Metropolitan Police is stymied by the death of a man found floating in Tokyo Bay, shortly after he is reported missing by his live-in girlfriend.

When they visit to interview her, they find out she'd left town. Then, they subsequently find out she'd been the battered half of an abusive relationship.

And, as it turns out, the abused young woman was aided by two elderly ladies. One, the rueful mother of an abandoned baby, possibly related to her. The other, the long-lost mother of a research physicist...

-----

Higashino's Detective Galileo series finale (1998-2021) draws parallels to the finale of his earlier police procedural series, "The Final Curtain" (orig. 2013) featuring Tokyo Metro Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga (1986-2013). In both finales, the author introduces to his readers the biological mothers of both protagonists for the first time, although under drastically different perspectives, one of them having met a tragic end. Both protagonists are popular in Japanese literature and filmdom.

Keigo Higashino keeps it down to earth in his writing, a verisimilitude that many readers can identify with. Vicariously for those in the know, a taste of Japan for others. You could almost slurp the ramen, sip an Asahi Super Dry in the neighborhood izakaya. In the streets, alleys, and under the "shotengai", the ubiquitous Japanese covered markets, as he vividly portrays the privileged, the working class, the marginalized in equal light. The nuisances, the colloquialisms, the daily grind of Japanese life; the good, the hard truths and even the dregs frowned upon in society.

Simply pleasurable reading!

Review based on an advanced reading copy courtesy of St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books, and NetGalley.

Another great book by this author a cerebral police procedural mystery based in modern day Japan.

There is a complicated set of circumstances that lead up to the murder, beginning with a single mother abandoning her baby anonymously to an orphanage which lead to modern day circumstances. The authors inclusion of Japanese culture and social habits makes for an intriguing experience for those who aren’t aware of the culture or habits.

The translator did an excellent job emphasising the aspect of the story that was important and integral to the twists.　This book will keep you guessing, surprise you and take you on many twists and turns to solve the murder.

Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press | Minotaur Books for this ARC . This is my honest review.

3.5 stars rounded up. I both love Keigo Higashino's writing and find it a bit daunting. His books are perfect examples of character driven thrillers and I appreciate the care he puts into crafting each character. The reader is never left wondering motives or feelings. That being said, I personally find character driven stories harder to digest than plot driven ones. Don't get me wrong, the plot in his books are always great and I love his endings, it just takes some work to get there. While this wasn't my favorite of his books, I will definitely be reading more of his work.

First off, thanks to Netgalley and Macmillian Publishers for this Arc of Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino. I'm not sure when I discovered these series from the author, but I have fallen in love with them. (well at least a few of them). I am fascinated how the police operate in Japan and how different it feels from the US or some of the Nordic mysteries I've read. I've come to expect a lot of twists and turns from Keigo, and Invisible Helix has them, but they aren't all that surprising. I'm used to being blown away by the reveal, because I've guessed wrong, and the great Galileo has figured it all out.

The characters are familiar at this point, and it makes it easy to jump right in and follow along. The Prologue is beautiful as always and really sets the tone for the whole story. Which I won't really get into, because the description of the novel provided gives you everything you need to know, and since this is a mystery, I won't give anything away or impose my bias in any way.

If you haven't read any other Higashino novels, you might be a little confused by some of the characters that have long been established, but you really get into the details the police follow to find their killer.

If you have read other Higashino novels, you might be a little disappointed in the mystery, but it's still a fine way to pass a couple of days.

Interesting plot and well-drawn characters, marred by the writing
Tokyo police find the body of a young man with a bullet in his back floating in Tokyo Bay. His live-in girlfriend Sonoka Shimauchi, whom he reportedly abused physically, has gone missing after reporting his disappearance, and the police go searching for her as the prime suspect. The search involves interactions with other people from Sonoko’s life, such as an artist who had served as a surrogate mother to Sonoka when she was growing up. The primary investigator is Kaoru Utsumi, the junior member as well as the only woman on the investigating team. The nicely drawn characters were for me the best part of the book.
I enjoyed the first book in this series very much, but this one rather disappointed me. The book description from the publisher gives a gripping and accurate introduction to the plot, but the book itself moves does not flow well. In addition, the unique and fun aspect of this series was the involvement of physics professor Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a.k.a. Detective Galileo. He was not as prominent as I had expected or wanted; the professor was not even mentioned until 25% of the way through the book.
The actual writing was not polished, containing awkward sentences, split infinitives and similar weaknesses that caused me to wonder if the translator was perhaps not a native speaker of English. In addition, practically all the characters’ names began with “K” or “M”, which made it especially difficult to sort them out; this might not be as big a problem for a Japanese reader.
I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley and Minotaur Books.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of Japan’s master of mysteries’ latest book, Invisible Helix. I’m not sure if he has more books and characters in Japan, but Keigo Higashino has two characters who solve mysteries in different series in his English translated novels: Detective Kyoichiro Kaga and Professor Yukawa, also known as Detective Galileo. I’ve read nearly all of the Higashino mysteries that have been translated in English, but the last two books that I read, which were Detective Kaga books, were not as good as some of the others. The stories moved along nicely, but I felt like the plot twist and motivation for the murder was somewhat farfetched. This book, however, finds Higashino returning to form, and I think I realized that I enjoy the Detective Galileo books more than the Kaga books.

Like some of the other Higashino mysteries, this book focuses on a kind of cultural nuance of Japanese society—in particular, it looks at the stigma of single parenthood, and how women, especially women in post-war Japan, struggled to care for children when they were not married or had recently lost partners. The story starts off with a woman who moves from the countryside to Tokyo to escape the lack of opportunities in her families village. She finds more opportunities in Tokyo, and also meets a new man. They eventually fall in love, and the woman, who remains unnamed, becomes pregnant. The father sticks around, but dies suddenly, possibly due to working too hard to try to provide for his new family. The woman gives birth shortly after, but without a job or child care options, she must give up the child for adoption. It’s also kind of implied that being an unmarried mother was somewhat of a social stigma, since the woman was hesitant to tell her parents about the baby. The book then moves from this prologue to the story of Sonoka and Chizuko Shimauchi, a daughter and her single mother in current day Japan. Chizuko, the mother, is somewhat evasive about Sonoka’s father, but Sonoka has a generally happy life with a mother who deeply loves and cares for her. Despite being a single mother, Chizuko works hard and even moves to take a new job so that Sonoka can attend design school after graduating high school. Sonoka, who works in a floral shop, has a happy life, until Chizuko suddenly dies. I thought that this might be the mystery, but actually, that is still to come. While Sonoka struggles to come to grips with her mother’s death, she meets a young man at her job, and he eventually moves in with her, providing her with new furniture, telling her to get rid of her mother’s old stuff. I was a little surprised by how quickly Ryota Uetsuji moves in and takes over Sonoka’s life, but we also kind of learn that Sonoka heavily relied on her mother and kind of let people take the initiative with things. I’m not sure if Ryota sensed this or saw Sonoka as an opportunity to have a place to live, but generally he is an unlikeable character. He seems a little nice at first, and his appearance in Sonoka’s life has some parallels with the woman in the prologue. I think that this worked nicely in providing the reader with a kind of familiar template of lonely women trying to survive on their own, who meet men. However, to challenge our assumptions, we see how aggressive and pushy Ryota is, and he seems more like a freeloader than the kind of hard worker that the woman in the prologue met.

This all happens in the first chapter. By the second chapter, Ryota is dead, discovered washed ashore with a bullet in the back of his head. Detectives Kusanagi and Kaoru Utsumi are assigned to the case, and this is where the story really picks up. As Ryota’s live in girlfriend, Sonoka is immediately a suspect. She was away on a trip with a friend, but she has yet to return to work, taking a sudden and unexpected leave before Ryota’s body was discovered. Furthermore, she seems to have disappeared with a mysterious writer of children’s books who goes by Nana Asahi, but is really known as Nae Matsunaga. Sonoka’s disappearance sets of an investigation and search for her whereabouts, and the presences of Nana Asahi also leads the detectives to Professor Manabu Yukawa, who received a citation and a copy of one of Nana Asahi’s books for children about a scientific concept. I leave the story there without much more since after this point, I really couldn’t put the book down. Higashino’s narrative and the pursuit of Sonoka and Nana/Nae are propulsive and lead to many plot twists and turns. I also liked that there weren’t too many other characters introduced, but there are some interesting reveals, and much of these revelations deal with the kind of cultural beliefs in children and adoption in Japan. Although I really liked this story and found the mystery intriguing, I know that sometimes Japanese mysteries can be less appealing to Western audiences. Sometimes these can be a slow burn, but I really found this book more fast paced. The chapters are short and focused on the main characters, primarily told from the perspective of the detectives looking for clues and trying to verify their hypothesis about who killed Ryota and what the connection is between Sonoka and Nana/Nae. This leads them to investigate more into both Sonoka’s and Nana/Nae’s background, as well as the background of Sonoka’s mother Chizuko. There is another character, Hidemi Negishi, an owner and mama-san of a hostess club, who also ends up playing an important role in the book. The other part of the reveal which may be a challenge for western audiences is that part of the reveal also depends on interpretation of Japanese kanji and Chinese characters for the meaning of a word. I think the translator did an excellent job in explaining this and emphasizing its importance to the story and twist; however, I’m not sure whether every reader will be familiar with this kind of writing. Regardless, the book kept me guessing, and I was definitely surprised by the ending. There are many twists, even beyond when the murder is solved. This also made me want to continue to read to find out what would happen next. I was excited to find this book on NetGalley and see that it was available to read. I was even more excited after I read it to see that Higashino has returned to form, and I hope that his next mystery will be with Detective Galileo and will be just as entertaining as this one.

A solid mystery/police procedural from Higashino that can be read as a standalone. While this did feel a bit sluggish at times, everything wrapped up nicely in classic Higashino fashion. I don't think it's among his best works, but it's a pretty satisfying read for one looking for a mystery novel. I do really dislike the translator still, particularly his overuse of old fashioned idioms.

I consumed this one in 3 days. I've become obsessed with Detectives Kaga and Galileo, reading all of the translated mysteries featuring them this year. This mystery played out very well, given the very little information the police and the readers start with. I loved the lost family parallels and the unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated characters. I hoped for more entertaining police work rather than constant interviews, but given the case, I thought it was executed nicely. Given the title, I expected that DNA testing would play a more significant role in the case as well. Regardless, another great read from Keigo!

An unusual mystery. It took a bit to get used to the bouncing around in the perspectives, but the story came together. It had a lot of background material that made the book longer than I thought it should be. There were some twists I didn't see coming, but made the story better.

Though this was book 5 in a series, it was completely fine to read as a stand alone. I have not read the previous 4 and was able to follow the story lines.

This book was translated so it doesn’t flow as an English written book would, however the translation was very good and easy to read. There were unexpected twists and parts I had to re-read because I needed to wrap my head around the twist.

Thank you to Keigo Higashino, NetGalley, and Minotaur Books for this ARC!

"Detective Galileo, Keigo Higashino's best loved character from The Devotion of Suspect X, returns in a case where hidden history, and an impossible crime, are linked by nearly invisible threads in surprising ways.

The body of a young man is found floating in Tokyo Bay. But his death was no accident - Ryota Uetsuji was shot. He'd been reported missing the week before by his live-in girlfriend Sonoka Shimauchi, but when detectives from the Homicide Squad go to interview her, she is nowhere to be found. She's taken time off from work, clothes and effects are missing from the apartment she shared. And when the detectives learn that she was the victim of domestic abuse, they presume that she was the killer. But her alibi is airtight - she was hours away in Kyoto when Ryota disappeared, forcing Detectives Kusanagi and Utsumi to restart their investigation.

But if Sonoko didn't kill her abusive lover, then who did? A thin thread of association leads them to their old consultant, brilliant physicist Manabu Yukawa, known in the department as "Detective Galileo." With Sonoko still missing, the detectives investigate other threads of association - an eccentric artist, who was Sonoko's mother figure after her own single mother passed; and an older woman who is the owner of a hostess club. And how is Sonoko continuing to stay one step ahead of the police searching for her? It's up to Galileo to find the nearly hidden threads of history and coincidence that connect the people around the bloody murder- which, surprisingly, connect to his own traumatic past - to unravel not merely the facts of the crime but the helix that ties them all together."

And if the person you're buying a Christmas present for isn't into the cozier side of life, how about some murder? It's not the holidays without murder, in my mind...

INVISIBLE HELIX read like a perfectly serviceable mystery to me, but it didn't feel like a mind-blowing Higashino mystery (which I have, perhaps unrealistically, come to expect from the author). It did have the added bonus of addressing adoption in Japan, which interested me as a mother of an adopted Japanese child, so the social dynamics were quite interesting. While it was far from Higashino's best books, this was an entertaining read--particularly for those interested in less-discussed elements of Japanese culture.

This is the tenth volume in the Detective Galileo series, and my second. I am not familiar with the characters enough to find much significance in the surprising backstory revealed here. For longtime fans, it will probably be a shock. That said, even if I wasn’t too invested in that part, the investigation was enough to maintain my interest. It’s fascinating how the police procedures are similar to what I’m used to from American and British mysteries, but with differences that I can only assume are intrinsic to Japanese culture. This is also why I like to read international novels, to see how the characters live. In this regard, this novel delivered as well. Some concepts were maybe a little foreign to me, but it made the story different from other crime books. The plot was entertaining, if not very surprising, and the parts worked well to make everything make sense. The characters were maybe too unusual for me to relate to anyone, although the story itself was interesting enough to keep me turning the pages. A different type of mystery.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/St. Martin's Press | Minotaur Books.

Invisible Helix is a captivating mystery that showcases the author's signature blend of intricate plotting and insightful character study. The novel delves into the complexities of human relationships, the weight of the past, and the destructive power of domestic abuse.
Higashino's ability to weave seemingly disparate threads into a coherent narrative is impressive. The backstory of familial bonds and the impact of trauma is particularly poignant and relatable, adding depth to the characters and elevating the story beyond a mere whodunit.
However, while the mystery is engrossing, the resolution feels somewhat contrived. While unexpected, A series of coincidences stretch credibility and weaken the story's overall impact. Additionally, the pacing, while strong in the beginning and end, tends to sag in the middle, slowing down the momentum.
The characters, though well-developed, need more emotional depth to resonate with the reader fully. While their motivations are clear, their actions often feel predictable rather than surprising. Despite these shortcomings, the writing is as beautiful as ever, with Higashino's prose drawing the reader into the story effortlessly.
Ultimately, Invisible Helix is a thought-provoking and well-crafted mystery that, while not perfect, is a testament to Higashino's skill as a storyteller. The unexpected twist at the end, though reliant on a certain degree of coincidence, is intriguing and leaves a lasting impression.

3.5/5

This latest Detective Galileo mystery by Keigo Higashino is a smart, layered story that keeps you guessing. The case twists and turns through hidden histories and intricate relationships, making for an engaging puzzle. While the pacing could be slow at times, Higashino’s complex characters and Detective Galileo's scientific approach to unraveling the truth made it a compelling read. The final connections were especially satisfying, leaving a strong impression.

Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino is an engaging read from start to finish with a well developed plot and characters. A recommended read!

Book #10 in the series, but Book #5 to be translated into English. Strange.

Ryota Uetsuji is found floating in Tokyo Bay, shot to death. His girlfriend Sonoka Shimauchi had reported him missing, but the homicide investigators cannot find her. They discover she was the victim of domestic abuse, but Sonoka was hours away, vacationing with a girlfriend, when Ryota was shot, forcing detectives Kusanagi and Utsumi to look for other suspects. Eventually, the detectives find their way to physicist Manabu Yukawa, (a/k/a Detective Galileo, who helped them before, via his ties to a children's book author and close friend of Sonoka's deceased mother. Galileo backtracks though hidden threads of history at an orphanage and his own tragic history to identify the killer and motive.

It's an interesting story but seems farfetched to think that the helical links between the characters could occur in real life. This is the first of the Detective Galileo books I've read although I have intended to read the earlier ones. This is ok as a standalone although you need to make a few leaps to understand the history between the various characters. One of the things I am curious about is the author's depiction of the Hostess Bar atmosphere as being cutthroat. I don't disbelieve but I'd like to learn more about it.