Wanna entice me to read past the first few pages of your book? You're gonna need more than an interesting situation. You're going to want me to be there in the pages with your characters, experiencing everything right alongside them. So, let’s say that they’ve just seen red, lost their temper, cool or emotional equilibrium and then y’know, acted upon it. They did something that felt good and satisfying in a moment of rage or frustration boiling over, of provocation and righteous anger - or let’s not even take the high road – they made a split-second decision at the nexus of opportunity and greed or convenience and lust, and whatever the motive, they now have an irrevocable act lugging eternal implications behind it, stuck to them. What next?

That's the kind of question that really gets me. The messy details of survival - emotional, relational, physical - those interest me so much more than the ability to detach from their humanity and become a calculating master criminal.

I just picked up The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino and I have the feeling it's attempting to have its cake while pigging out at the same time. It started with a bad situation that had me interested - I believed the characters and the crime (understandable, if ill advised) - but then it switched point of view to a policeman investigating the crime. The more it became a procedural, the more I felt myself tuning out (a POV switch that recently had a similar effect on me in Three Seconds and A Very Simple Crime). The ping-pong POV and the increasingly intricate and well-thought-out cat and mouse play are threatening to overshadow what could be a really great crime story if confined to the perpetrator's POV. After all, they are me. The cop is not. Is he you?

Funny thing is, though I don't care about the cop and though there is some awkwardness to the translation (from Japanese), I feel compelled to find out where this one leads. Can Higashino do it? Can he have it both ways? 

I dunno, what do you think? Have you read this one? Do you automatically identify with the detective or do you wish they'd get out of the way of those with a personal stake in the crime?

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.