“Simple deduction.” Good, if not knock-your-socks-off brilliant, summer pot-boiler with a setup that wouldn’t have been out of place in Jimmy McGovern’s “Cracker” (c.f. the “Best Boys” episode). It certainly rockets past, there is only the merest sprinkling of Japanese exoticism (basically just names) and there’s nothing in it that is going to put any of those two million readers off recommending it to their friends. I think in Japan it must have been a zeitgeisty hit, I can’t quite see what else in it would have been responsible for its runaway success – although I seem to recall something about single mothers strangling their exes having a frisson among the Japanese we Godless westerners just shrug at. Thank you, Jeremy Kyle. The narrative is the usual cat and mouse game but here the suspect is a mathematician and the lead cop has a physicist chum he blabs confidential information to. Basically it’s “what if Holmes never left the lab?” although despite the various films and TV shows spinning off the character of “Detective Galileo” not much is made of this, just that our hero is prone to brooding ruminations followed up, via some prodding, by some illuminating insight or other. In contrast the Times quote on the cover – “The Japanese Stieg Larsson” – is incredibly dumb; “Suspect X” is not remotely like the “Millennium” novels, that’s just publishing speak for “here’s the next crossover hit (we hope)”.
