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The international success of Keigo Higashino's procedurals featuring an unusual team of a police detective and a physics professor has spurred the translation of the author's earlier work: MALICE dates from the 1990s and involves a different Tokyo investigator, Kyoichiro Kaga. MALICE is a short but tightly written story of an intense psychological battle waged between a stalwart and persistent detective and his chief suspect, Osamu Nonoguchi. The latter is a friend of the dead man, Kunihiko Hidaka, a famous novelist, who is found in his locked office inside a locked house. Intriguingly, Higashino appears to start with the same device that he later perfects in SALVATION OF A SAINT, a suspenseful murder mystery seemingly committed in a locked room. In MALICE , all of the prime suspects have solid alibis: At the time of the murder, Nonoguchi was at home with his editor, who heard him talk to Hidaka on the phone about seeing him later. Hidaka's wife, who discovers the body along with his best friend, was at a motel waiting for her husband to join her before their long-awaited move to Vancouver.
But unlike the perfect crime scenario of SALVATION OF A SAINT, forensic evidence does not support the timeline proposed by Nonoguchi, who finds himself under Kaga's laser inspection. In an interesting twist, Kaga and Nonoguchi both taught at the same school before Kaga left to join the police force. Nonoguchi retired much later to focus on writing children's books. But Nonoguchi was also Hidaka's best friend from middle school, a friendship that was interrupted for many years because they attended different high schools and drifted apart. Later on, their mutual interest in writing brought them back together. Why, Kaga wonders, might Nonoguchi murder his best friend, someone who acted as a mentor to him and encouraged him to become a published author?
Without much prodding or investigation, Nonoguchi confesses to the murder and insists that, author that he is, he must carefully write down his confession. He paints Hidaka as a bully and blackmailer and himself as the lover of Hidaka's first wife, who died as the result of a traffic accident years earlier. But Kaga doesn't entirely believe what he has read, and while his boss thinks there is enough evidence for a conviction, Kaga isn't comfortable until he knows the entire truth. He also feels that he must move quickly because Nonoguchi has cancer, for which he has refused surgery. If there is going to be a legal victory and some justice for the deceased, it cannot wait.
The author has divided the story into two first-person narratives. Half of the novel consists of Nonoguchi's confession; the other half, Kaga's reaction and investigation. Both rethink and revise their accounts, and the real truth seems out of reach.
This audio is performed by Jeff Woodman. He is a versatile actor, who has narrated, just to name two of his many audios, the British adolescent Christopher in THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME and the Hindu-inflected accent of Pi Patel in THE LIFE OF PI. His range is amazing.
Woodman deftly creates two very different voices for Kaga and Nonoguchi. The detective sounds younger, patient, and thoughtful. Woodman tries to have Nonoguchi's narrative come across as simple, precise, and honest. Woodman pauses judiciously when the suspect is trying to think of the best answer. The performer is excellent in not tipping the hand of the author, which I think would be all too easy to do here.
MALICE is a clever and subtle work. In setting up his antagonists, Higashino examines several facets of competition: People who work in the same field; people who attended school together but who have varying degrees of success in their adulthood; people who initially work together and then pursue different endeavors. Though MALICE is not so intricate a work as the later award-winning DEVOTION OF SUSPECT X, it is still intriguing and clever, and the performance is handled expertly.
§ An avid audiophile, Karla Jay is a retired professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies. She is a frequent contributor to this site.
Reviewed by Karla Jay, November 2014
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