My Grandfather, the Master Detective

Description

A Japanese The Thursday Murder Club, taking healing fiction for a mystery-filled spin with this bestseller that has sold more than 200,000 copies in Japan.

He’s not your average Grandpa.

As a lover of classic crime stories, it’s no surprise that schoolteacher Kaede encounters everyday mysteries more often than your typical twenty-seven-year-old.

Solving them is another matter, though. For that, she turns to her beloved grandfather, who retains a keen sharpness of mind despite his dementia, and who was once a key member of The Waseda Mystery Club. From impossible locked room murders to confounding missing persons cases, the grandfather-granddaughter duo “weave stories” to get to the bottom of every mystery. But all the while, an insidious shadow from Kaede’s past slowly closes in on her . . .

Steeped in references to classic crime from Christie to Chesterton to Poe, My Grandfather, the Master Detective plays with the genre, capturing readers’ imagination in this Tokyo-set escapist mystery. Its charming characters and affectionate focus on relationships echo heartwarming Japanese titles such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Masateru Konishi
Published: 03/17/2026
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
ISBN: 9798217177639
Pages: 336

About the Author
Masateru Konishi graduated from the Department of English and American Literature at Meiji University and now works as a writer for TV and radio. He has previously written for the stage as well as the novelization of manga, but My Grandfather, the Master Detective is his first completely original novel. Partly based on his own experience of caring for his father with dementia, the book won the twenty-first edition of the prestigious “This Mystery is Amazing!” Grand Prize.

Louise Heal Kawai has been a translator of Japanese literature since 2006, translating several different genres of contemporary fiction. Her published translations include The Cat Who Saved Books; The Honjin Murders; Daido Tamaki’s Milk, which appeared in the short story anthology Inside and Other Short Fiction; Tendo Shoko’s bestselling autobiography Yakuza Moon; and most recently Building Waves, a novel by feminist writer and poet Tomioka Taeko.