This is a collection of short stories that were first published between 1985 and 1988 in different magazines. In other words, these short stories were written by Higashino at the very start (1985) of his career.

There are three volumes of short stories published by Kobunsha: 『犯人のいない殺人の夜』, 『怪しい人びと』and 『あの頃の誰か』.

Review

Not only did I love these short stories, but I was also glad to read some of Higashino’s first writings. All the short stories are entertaining, easy to read, suspenseful, and Keigo Higashino always manages to surprise his reader at the end, even in a 40 pages short story.

That being said, I don’t consider this collection to be the best I have read. I prefered 『嘘をもうひとつだけ』or 『探偵倶楽部』which are also collections of short stories. In these two books we follow the same detectives throughout the stories: Kyoichiro Kaga in the first one and the Membership Detective Club in the second one.

But I really enjoyed reading 『犯人のいない殺人の夜』. I need to read more books by Keigo Higashino to confirm this, but I think that I particularly like his writings from the 1980s and 1990s. While I found some of the short stories better than others, I also found that they all had this particular style that I love so much in Keigo Higashino’s books.

I read this book very fast and could not put it down once I started a short story. If you like short murder mysteries,『犯人のいない殺人の夜』is a good choice!