Malice

Malice is a mystery novel by the Japanese writer Keigo Higashino, published in Japanese in 1996 under the title Akui and translated into English by Alexander O. Smith in 2011. It belongs to Higashino's Kaga series, which follows police detective Kyoichiro Kaga through a run of novels investigating murder cases in Tokyo. Higashino's fiction in the series is frequently described as treating loyalty, obligation and the oppressive weight of long-held personal relationships as the underlying engines of crime, and Malice, one of the earlier Kaga novels to reach English readers, helped introduce the series and Higashino's broader body of psychologically driven mystery writing to an international audience.