I finished Malice with a fairly underwhelming impression. The novel has an unusual structure and a clever central idea, but overall it felt thinner than I expected. The psychological depth never fully opened up, and the plot, despite being built around a murder mystery, did not keep me consistently absorbed. By the end, I could see what the book was trying to do, yet it still left me feeling that something was missing.
What stands out most is the way the story is told. The case is narrated back and forth through the first-person voices of the male protagonist and the detective. That alternating "I" perspective is distinctive, and it strongly recalls novels that build tension by letting different characters present their own versions of events.
The structure unfolds in a very deliberate way.
The first chapter is the protagonist’s diary. It lays out his relationship with the victim, and then the victim is suddenly murdered.
The second chapter switches to the detective’s diary. It is extremely short, only a few pages, and serves mainly to present the case from the investigator’s side.
The third chapter returns to the protagonist’s diary. Here, details uncovered by the detective begin to point toward the protagonist as the killer. He even admits that he is the murderer, yet he absolutely refuses to explain his motive. By this point, the book is only around eighty pages in, which means the identity of the killer is effectively confirmed very early.
The fourth chapter goes back to the detective. Its main purpose is to uncover motive. The detective reexamines the case piece by piece, scrutinizing small details and building a chain of reasoning until he finds the relevant “evidence” and reaches a conclusion about why the protagonist committed the crime.
In the fifth chapter, the protagonist acknowledges that the detective’s reasoning is correct and gives a more detailed account of how the murder was carried out. If the novel had ended there, it would still have felt complete in a conventional sense. But even at that stage, there was already a sense that the story had not yet delivered its real core.
The sixth chapter shifts again to the detective, who starts noticing that certain details do not fit together. There are contradictions, and one crucial clue comes from the calluses on the protagonist’s hand.
The seventh chapter takes the form of an interview record. The detective speaks with people who knew the protagonist and the victim during their school years, gradually building a picture of both men’s personalities and past behavior. This section functions almost like evidence gathering.
The eighth chapter is another short detective entry, this time describing an incident from his own years as a schoolteacher, specifically how he dealt with bullying on campus. It is brief, only several pages, but clearly meant to connect to the emotional and moral center of the case.
The ninth and final chapter delivers the reversal. Based on the interviews from chapter seven and his own deductions, the detective realizes that the earlier conclusion was actually a trap set by the protagonist. The protagonist had prepared both the setup and the so-called evidence in advance so that the police would discover the clues and arrive at a false explanation on their own. He did not simply state his real motive; he wanted the authorities to construct the wrong answer themselves. That is where the character’s ingenuity lies. In the final stretch, the detective notices the deception hidden in those details, untangles the trap, and finally confirms the true motive behind the murder.
In essence, though, the plot is actually quite simple.
When the protagonist was in school, he was bullied so badly that he became afraid to attend classes. The future victim helped him return to school. Soon after that, the victim also became a target of bullying, but instead of standing up for him, the protagonist did the opposite and sided with the abuse.
As adults, the victim becomes a bestselling author. The protagonist grows resentful and psychologically unbalanced out of envy. The victim later writes a novel based on the bullying he suffered as a child, and in the process of writing it, he gathers evidence of the protagonist’s past wrongdoing. Once the protagonist learns that he has cancer and realizes those disgraceful actions from his youth may be exposed, he decides to kill the victim.
But he does not want to commit an ordinary murder. He creates an elaborate scheme designed to make it look as though the victim had blackmailed him into ghostwriting books. In other words, he wants to shape the story so that public sympathy will lean toward him. That false narrative becomes the engine of the entire novel.
The trap itself is undeniably clever. He begins preparing it a full year in advance. He secretly enters the victim’s home to film videotapes, steals photographs and clothing belonging to the victim’s wife, and hand-copies several novels amounting to at least hundreds of thousands of characters. All of that is arranged to support the fabricated scenario that he had failed to kill the victim and was instead being coerced into ghostwriting.
Even so, while reading, I kept feeling that some of these details were hard to accept. Newly made videotapes and recently copied handwriting should not be identical to materials from seven years earlier. If the police had simply examined them carefully, the differences should have been detectable. No matter how well someone stages the timing, time itself is not so easy to fake.
Another point that bothered me is that the novel never clearly explains whether the victim’s wife died by suicide or was killed. That ambiguity did not feel intriguing to me so much as incomplete.
So although the novel does have a well-designed trick at its center, and the final reversal does give the story a jolt, I still think it falls short of Keigo Higashino’s best work. The concept is smart, but the emotional and narrative impact did not reach the level I had hoped for.