When a body is found in a hot-spring town, dead from hydrogen sulfide poisoning, geochemist Shusuke Aoe is brought in by the police to investigate. The death is written off as an accident, but something doesn't add up, and at the scene, Shusuke comes across a young woman searching for her missing friend. Two months later, he finds himself examining an almost identical incident in a completely different part of Japan. Are the cases related? Did the victims know each other? As these thoughts swirl around his head, Shusuke encounters the same young woman he met at the first crime scene. And before his very eyes, mysterious events begin to happen around her…

Laplace's Witch has a story by Keigo Higashino. English translation is done by Stephen Paul. Published by Avocado House (October 13, 2026).

Erica Friedman
Rating:

There are several methods of solving mysteries in novels. Famously, Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle favored the “cousin from South America” model in which there was no way the reader could possibly know who did it, since they lacked crucial information. There is the Columbo method, we'll call it, in which the reader knows who done it, and the narrative is devoted to conclusively proving why and how.

In Laplace's Witch, Keigo Higashino favors a method in which several independent actors circle around the truth, until they are able to tie it together. This would work, except for one small problem. It is the same problem I had with Higashino's The Dark Magician: Murder In A Town With No Name, which is to say that relatively early on in the book, we are presented with an inconsequential piece of information that gives the game away. This is not entirely Higashino's fault. I grew up watching and reading an enormous amount of mysteries and I know a gun on the wall or a dog in the night when I see it. And, when one is writing a novel, coming up with a clever title is very important. If it is too clever, however, it'll give away the trick.

Unlike The Dark Magician, the characters here are not unpleasant to be around. This book feels very much like a setup to a series…I am not opposed to reading more. As a murder mystery, there should be need to warn, but it is about a series of horrific crimes. It also includes some emotional abuse by parents, murder and near death.

This is the kind of beach reading I enjoy. Someone awful dies, someone who was caused to be awful does it, detective that has unusual powers of observation figures it out, we run behind them playing catch up. Having multiple people following the mystery from different perspectives serves to distract the reader from the solution until they have information to put it all together.