I am not a perfect reader. I can get impatient, huffing if a book hasn’t grabbed me by page three. And then I read something like Malice and it serves as a lesson that giving a book the chance to get its claws dug in can reward you with that grinning, page-turning excitement that good literature delivers. Malice starts with the fairly clinical notes of children’s book author Nonoguchi Osamu, as he goes to pay his dear friend, the bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka, one last visit before the latter jets off to start afresh in Vancouver with his new wife, Rie. They talk, they laugh, and they part ways when another visitor arrives – a woman angered at Hidaka’s portrayal of her brother in a fictional account of their youth. Later that afternoon, Osamu gets an unnerving call from his friend, asking him to come over in the evening. But when he arrives, no one answers the door. Hidaka is home, yes – but he’s no longer alive.

I felt terribly smug when I thought I knew the outcome for this whole scenario, until it turned out (unsurprisingly) that Keigo Higashino, an award-winning author, is actually much smarter than I am. Malice changes from a quiet and everyday case of someone being coshed on the head then strangled to a complex and completely enthralling story of a very clever killer and the methodical detective who is determined to separate fact from fiction. The women aren’t wispy (as they often are in crime fiction), the plot isn’t clichéd, and the truth is always just a little further away than you might think. An utterly revealing and exciting book on the unwavering trust the reader puts in the writer.

Fiona Hardy