Keigo Higashino

Keigo Higashino is Japan's most consistently bestselling crime novelist and one of the most popular mystery writers in the world, with over a hundred million copies of his books sold in Japan alone. Born in Osaka in 1958, he began writing crime fiction while working as an engineer and won the prestigious Edogawa Ranpo Prize for his debut in 1985.

His breakthrough — and his most celebrated novel internationally — is The Devotion of Suspect X (2005), in which the puzzle is not whodunit but how: we know from the beginning who committed the crime, and the brilliance of the novel lies in watching a genius mathematician construct an alibi of extraordinary ingenuity. The novel won the Japanese Booksellers' Award and has been adapted multiple times. Higashino's Salvation of a Saint, The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping, and the Galileo series have similarly rewired Western readers' expectations of what crime fiction can do.