Book Review: Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino

A complex ad intricate book, that will need your complete devotion to be able to solve the crime with the little hints that the author keeps throwing your way via the characters and their observations, some tangible others not so tangible. And no it is not a police procedural.

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Drishyam may have been inspired by the
book but is very different from the novel

I became a Keigo Higashino fan in an instant. Via some friends in a Facebook group on reading I came to know about the fact that the film Drishyam starring Ajay Devgan is based on a book by the Japanese author. I had seen the film and had found it immensely good. Surprisingly the book was also not difficult to acquire and so I read it soon after this FB intervention. 

Devotion of Suspect X was such a mind-blowing read which I had not come across till that time ( I have since then read No Time for Goodbye by Canadian author Linwood Barclay which was a brilliant mystery and It Ends with Us by Coleen Hoover which is no whodunnit but is engrossing and moving.) The mundaneness with which the story progresses and the final twist was breathtaking and completely unimaginable. After 'X' I began to read all the Higashino books (very few of which are available English) and was astounded by his plots and executions be it Malice or Salvation of a Saint.

After a huge gap of time I could finally get my hands on the current book that I am going to talk about in today's blogpost 'Journey Under the Midnight Sun'. I was super excited and the big number of the pages only added fuel to the fire. Further add to it the main thread of the story where a detective is unable to solve a murder and is unable to let go of that case even after 20 years , following people associated with those who were impacted by the murder. I thought I would fly through those 539 pages, high on a fast moving plot.

But afsos aisa ho na saka (Sadly, it couldn't come to pass)!

I barely dragged myself through this book though I must assure you that the author does not let his readers down as far as plot construction and the main twist, which is Higashino's speciality it seems, in the plot is concerned. But, you have to really read through a lot of stuff happening in the early 90s in the Japanese market, the gaming industry, onset of the deployment of the ATM machines and during the dawn of the personal computers. 

I wouldn't say it was all irrelevant to the story but it really weighed down the pace of the story-the story of two teenagers- Ryo and Yuhiko, who are bound together inextricably through a crime involving one's father and  the other's mother. The storyline follows them through two decades after a dead body of pawn broker is found in an abandoned building.

But I would still recommend it to be read if you are a fan of the genre. Maybe you will find it interesting to read how pirated games and PCs were sold and made money off, maybe the scams involving the then newly launched ATM machines.

PS: Drishyam may have been inspired by the book Devotion of Suspect X, but is very different from the novel.

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