
Journey Under the Midnight Sun
Translated by Alexander O. Smith
— Worth the detour
About
In 1973 Osaka, a man is found murdered in an abandoned building. Detective Sasagaki begins piecing together connections to two young people: the dark, taciturn son of the victim and the unexpectedly captivating daughter of the prime suspect. Then the case goes cold. Over the next twenty years, Sasagaki watches from the margins as these two lives unfold — successful, ambitious, and shadowed by something neither will acknowledge. Keigo Higashino's epic mystery spans two decades, following its characters from childhood through adulthood as the detective's obsession with the unsolved case becomes a kind of parallel narrative to the lives he's surveilling. The structure is audacious: a crime novel told in slow motion, where the tension builds not from chases but from the accumulating weight of time, secrets, and consequence. A mystery that asks how long a crime can echo — and whether some darkness, once encountered in childhood, becomes permanent.
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