newspaper by the man she loves, and she thinks: "… your words were like a knife stabbing me in the heart. That's why you have to die too."

Yoshitaka does die, poisoned by ingesting arsenous acid, a form of arsenic, in his morning cup of coffee. Of course, Ayane would be the prime suspect, except she was far away from their home at the time of his death. With Ayane seemingly impossible as the murderer, other suspects emerge. Hiromi Wakayama, one of Ayane's quilt work students and Yoshitaka's lover, was apparently the last person to see him alive. One of Yoshitaka's colleagues, who has no love lost for the dead CEO, quickly assumes his position in the company.

The police investigtors are lead by Kusanagi, a stodgy and plodding butcompetent male detective, and his assistant, Utsumi, an up-and-coming young woman detective. When the detectives hit a dead-end in finding how the coffee was poisoned, Utsumi contacts the real star of the novel, physicist and professor Manabu Yukawa. She has to secretly meet him because her boss and the professor had a falling out. "Utsumi watched the professor's face while he talked. Kusunagi had said that the man they called Detective Galileo had always been very helpful when it came to working on a case. But something to do with one particular investigation had caused a rift between the detective and the physicist … though no one had told her any of the details."

Yukawa can't resist trying to solve the seemingly perfect crime. As he puts his brilliant