Detective Galileo is a short story collection by Higashino Keigo about how you probably learned everything you ever needed to know to solve crimes in your 10th grade science class.
The stories center around Kusanagi Shunpei, a detective in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, who often goes to his friend Yukawa Manabu, a physics professor, for help with particularly confounding cases. The stories are interesting and have cool ideas behind them, but probably won't satisfy readers looking for traditional detective stories.
The issue is that the stories in Detective Galileo are about direct applications of specific, sometimes obscure, scientific principles. This results in two confounding problems.
The first problem is that the stories aren't traditionally "fair" or "solvable" because either you know the science or you don't. Most detective stories that rely on obscure or esoteric knowledge try to introduce that knowledge before the denouement, to guarantee that the reader has the necessary information to solve the problem. Not the case for Detective Galileo. The scientific mechanism is never mentioned before the solution, and is often clued in only vague, indirect ways.
The second problem is that there's rarely more to the answer than the scientific principle involved. For example, one story involves an explosion that occurs in the middle of the ocean. The solution is "scientific phenomenon X, which can cause explosions in the middle of the ocean." Once you know about "scientific phenomenon X" and realize it was at play, there's nothing more to the answer than "scientific phenomenon X" happened.
The thing that makes mysteries satisfying is the feeling of surprise, closure, and resolution when we reach the denouement and see how the author was able to conceal the truth of what happened right under our noses. Often, in addition to the question of how everything happened, the reader is tricked as to what happened as well. However, in Detective Galileo, that first "how" question can basically be answered with just the scientific mechanic, so it feels like the answer was hidden from the reader not because the method was clever, but because the reader just didn't have the necessary information. And the second "what" factor just never enters the equation. We are never tricked or confused as to what happened, we just don't know the scientific mechanic that caused it.
Another layer that takes away from the satisfaction of the stories is the fact that Kusanagi is often able to identify the culprit (if not outright catch them) through traditional detective work. He's able to figure out who it was, he just doesn't know how they did it. As a result, it makes the scientific components of the mysteries, which are supposed to be the main hook, feel almost pointless, since Kusanagi is able to make so much progress in his investigations without them.
This isn't to say the stories aren't interesting. Some of the scenarios are pretty cool. For instance, one story involves a man whose heart—and only his heart—has rotted. The stories also sometimes eschew traditional how/whodunnit structure to tackle other questions. In the last story, Kusanagi and Yukawa deal with a witness who claims he can give their prime suspect an alibi—based on what he saw in an out-of-body experience. The stories involve neat ideas that result in fun situations. They just don't stand up as traditional mysteries.
Also, he doesn't even get called "Detective Galileo" until the last story, and there isn't any particular reason for it, it just comes out of nowhere. It's very disappointing.
There's a drama called Galileo that's based on this book and the sequel, Yochimu, and while I've only seen the first episode, I do suspect that these stories work better as visual, hour-long, bite-sized chunks rather than short stories that feel a bit too long for their (lack of) payoff.
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