I continue to read these Higashino Keigo books even though the plots tend to be fairly ridiculous. I can't help wanting to know the solution, so they do keep my interest and I read every book in a few days. On the other hand, I never end up saying, *Wow, that was a great story!" Hats off to Higashino for finding a successful system, flawed as it is. ( )

In Silent Parade, a man who seems to have gotten away with murder twice simply by refusing to say anything to the police turns up dead, and it's up to Detective Galileo to find out what happened. While at first the case seems to be outside his usual wheelhouse and Yukawa looks into it only as a favor to his friends on the force, naturally it turns out that the man was murdered through a strange method that requires Yukawa's scientific knowledge to unravel.

So far, so typical of the series -- but from that point, Silent Parade begins to deviate from the formula of previous entries, and it doesn't entirely work. The Detective Galileo books are usually not so much whodunnits as howcatchems, and in cases where the culprit is intended to be sympathetic, this is much to their advantage. The fact that the identity of the culprit is not really in doubt allows the writer to show the culprit's POV without resorting to the cheap trick of "they just happen to never think about the fact that they're the murderer." (Of course, some details are still concealed from the reader, but it's easier to suspend disbelief for "some details" than "the entire fact that this person just killed someone.") The access to the character's POV increases the reader's investment in the character and creates a compelling tension in which the reader simultaneously wonders how Yukawa will unravel this one and sort of hopes that he won't. (Indeed, this book reveals that Yukawa himself regrets convincing the culprit to come clean in The Devotion of Suspect X.)

Silent Parade's central murder was carried off by a group of people working together, and the book attempts to keep the reader guessing about who exactly was involved, to what extent they were involved, and who actually did the killing. In all cases except one, this means that the reader gets little to no insight into their thoughts until their role in the murder has been established. (The one exception is likely a sort of fakeout -- the character looks like they're getting the same treatment that the culprit has in previous books so that it's a surprise to learn their role in the murder was very minor.) And then, of course, the large number of suspects and accessories to the murder means there just isn't as much time to spend exploring any particular one of them. In combination, these things made it hard to care very deeply about any of the characters, even though the reader is clearly supposed to.

The other departure is that most of the previous entries in the series have been built around a single major twist -- granted, many of these entries have been short stories, so they don't have much room for more than that, but so far this has been true even of the novels. Silent Parade, however, piles multiple twists on top of one another. This starts to strain credulity after a while, and in fact, the final twist contradicts the logic by which Yukawa deduced the previous twist, which is just sloppy. (In the vaguest possible terms, everyone thinks that Person A committed a murder, but Yukawa believes that A's actions in the aftermath would only make sense if they weren't the killer and therefore knew the evidence against them could only ever be circumstantial. Confronted with this, Person B breaks down and confesses that they did it... but then it turns out that the victim was still alive when B left the scene, and the final blow was dealt by A after all. So it wasn't impossible for conclusive evidence against A to exist, and A should have been well aware of that -- apparently they really were just so arrogant as to believe they couldn't be caught. Which means the entire chain of reasoning that led to the reveal of B's involvement was based on false premises and just kind of accidentally happened to hit on something close to the truth. The book never acknowledges this.)

All of that being said, I have a particular interest in the Japanese justice system and the ways that it is portrayed in fiction, and Silent Parade was interesting from that angle. In general, I've found that mainstream Japanese media is more likely than mainstream US media to acknowledge some of the problems with the system, even when police officers are the protagonists (although the problems are often attributed to a handful of bad actors, or else there's an attitude of "well, what can you do? That's just how it is"). And this aspect is particularly central in Silent Parade, which takes a bit of an unusual approach to the issue of overreliance on confessions: if most convictions rely on confessions, what happens when someone simply won't confess? Police and prosecutors, Silent Parade suggests, have no idea what to do with a suspect who won't cave to pressure. The murderer-turned-victim, in fact, learned this lesson from his father, a police officer who bragged about his ability to get confessions out of anyone.

Of course, in the end the highest good in this series is the revelation of the truth, and even if Yukawa is starting to have reservations about convincing people to turn themselves in, anyone who's supposed to be a good person ultimately does. And the major police characters are good people who are doing their best and were all set to doggedly pursue justice within the system had their plans not been interrupted by the murder. But it's interesting to me to see this sort of anxiety about what it means for the justice system to be so reliant on confessions play out from this angle, especially as it hasn't been a prominent theme in previous entries in the series. ( )

This book is a worthy conclusion (is it?) to the Detective Galileo series of books. Again, there is deep history involved in the crime. Many people want to kill the victim, who is a culprit himself. The method of killing is ingenious. The relationship between Kusanagi and Utsumi is professional but interesting.

In the end, however, the tale became a bit too convoluted. He could have avoided the final flourish. if so, the book would have been perfect. It is, however, a superb book. ( )

A decades old case opens with discovery of body, but suspect is not arraigned for lack of evidence. However the suspect is killed by an Orient Express style plot and surprising developments are aided by a physics professor nicknamed Detective Galileo.

I could not put this book down. The characters drew me into their individual stories. Then trying to put the entire mystery together kept me turning pages. Detective Galileo was even stumped at one point. This is another great novel from Keigo Higashino. ( )