3 Stars
This is the fifth in the Detective Galileo series. I’ve read several of Higashino’s crime fiction books, but I was disappointed in this one.
The body of Ryota Uetsuji is found in Tokyo Bay but a bullet wound clearly suggests a murder rather than an accident. His girlfriend, Sonoka Shimauchi, had reported him missing but then took time off work and has disappeared. Chief Inspector Kusanagi and Detective Inspector Kaoru Utsumi lead the investigation and call upon Professor Manabu Yukawa, a.k.a. Detective Galileo, to assist. It is he who makes connections and discovers that Nae Matsunaga, a longtime friend of Sonoka’s mother, and Nidemi Negishi, the owner of a hostess bar, may be involved.
The title clearly suggests the physical structure of DNA, and DNA does indeed play a role. However, it is the reference to DNA testing that leaves me totally confused. What are the chances that samples from a specific person and a random woman would result in a 99.5 percent probability of these two people being related? Sonoka thinks, “He’d taken samples from some completely different woman and her grandmother and sent them to the testing company” and the result “was a ‘99.5 percent or over’ probability of [their] being related.” Am I missing something?
There are so many coincidences in the book and these definitely weaken the plot. Even the description of the book states, “It's up to Galileo to find the nearly hidden threads of history and coincidence.” The revelations about Yukawa’s family at the end rely on a series on coincidences. Everyone has a lost family and secret background. There are three women who gave up children because they were unable to look after them.
Like previous Higashino mysteries, there are secret relationships among characters and connections between past and present events. The problem is that the books have become almost formulaic.
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