Category: Mystery

Dead Men Don’t Ski by Patricia Moyes

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This is the first in a series of mysteries published between 1959 and 1993 and featuring Inspector Henry Tibbett. I had never come across them, or their author Patricia Moyes, until now, but I really enjoyed this one and will definitely be looking for more.

Dead Men Don’t Ski begins with Henry Tibbett and his wife, Emmy, setting off on a skiing trip to Italy. It’s a much-needed holiday for the two of them, but Henry is also planning to mix business with pleasure. The hotel they’ll be staying at in Santa Chiara is suspected of being the centre of operations of a ring of drug smugglers and Henry has been asked by Scotland Yard to work with the local Italian police to find out who the culprits are. Of course, he doesn’t admit this to his fellow guests as he wants them to speak and act freely around him. These guests include a party of young English tourists – Jimmy, Roger and Caro; a retired military man, Colonel Buckfast and his wife; a beautiful Italian baroness and her possessive Austrian husband; and a German couple with their daughter and her prospective husband, as well as an assortment of hotel staff, skiing instructors and local residents.

At first, Henry and Emmy manage to blend in with everyone else, enjoying the scenery, attending skiing lessons and relaxing around the hotel. But when one of the guests boards the ski lift at the top of the mountain and is found dead by the time he reaches the bottom, Henry’s detective skills are needed to solve the crime and he will no longer be able to stay undercover.

This is an entertaining novel with a beautiful setting. Santa Chiara is described as a small village close to Chiusa near the border of Italy and Austria and drawing from the cultures of both countries. There are lovely descriptions of snow-covered peaks and valleys, pine trees and pink rock, Alpine houses with wooden balconies – and the Bella Vista Hotel perched high in the mountains. I was reminded of another ski resort mystery, Death in Kashmir by M.M. Kaye, although I thought that book was darker than this one.

I liked Henry Tibbett and it was also good to see so much of Emmy. Often the detective’s wife is kept very much in the background, maybe popping up now and then to make a cup of tea or answer the phone, but in this book Emmy is present from beginning to end. It would have been nice to see her play a bigger role in helping to actually solve the mystery, but maybe she will in one of the later books in the series. The other characters are also interesting; with such a mix of different nationalities you do need to be prepared for some slightly dated attitudes, but no worse than in most other books of this period. I was particularly drawn to Maria-Pia, the Baroness, and her cold, controlling husband Hermann, who turns out to have hidden depths.

As for the mystery itself, it’s a good one with plenty of suspects, although my heart sank when Spezzi, the Italian policeman working with Henry, draws up a detailed timetable of events, which is reproduced in the book. I find mysteries that focus on timings and alibis to be tedious and difficult to follow, so I was pleased that this book didn’t dwell too much on that after all – it was just part of Spezzi’s approach to crime solving and although his timetable did prove very useful, the interviews he and Henry conduct with the witnesses and suspects were just as important.

The first two books in this series are available now in attractive new editions from Farrago Books and with the next two advertised for publication later this year I hope that means they’ll be reissuing the whole series. I suspect it’s probably not essential to read them in order but I’m planning to try the second one, The Sunken Sailor, soon.

Thanks to Farrago Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz

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The Word is Murder, the first book in Anthony Horowitz’s series chronicling his partnership with the detective Daniel Hawthorne, is being adapted for film. Although Anthony, to his disappointment, has not been asked to write the script or participate in any other way in bringing his own story to life, both he and Hawthorne have been invited to visit the set in Hastings. Here they meet the cast and crew, including the two actors in the main roles – David Caine, playing Hawthorne, and Ralph Seymour, playing Horowitz himself. It’s clear that there are tensions between the two, so when Caine is found stabbed to death, Ralph is one of the prime suspects. However, it quickly emerges that almost everyone else on the set also has a motive for the murder. It seems that Hawthorne and Horowitz have found themselves with yet another crime to solve…

None of the above is true; it’s entirely fictional, but part of the fun (at least for me – I know not everyone likes it) is that Anthony Horowitz uses himself as a character throughout this series, in a clever blend of reality and imagination. Hawthorne is not a real person and neither are most of the others, but Horowitz occasionally refers to his real-life wife, Jill, his own books, and other aspects of his own life and career. He’s very self-deprecating and portrays himself as the Watson to Hawthorne’s Sherlock Holmes, often completely missing important clues and coming up with theories that turn out to be entirely wrong. A Deadly Episode is the sixth book in the series and although I would recommend reading them all in the correct order to fully understand the relationship between Horowitz and Hawthorne, it’s not really essential and each book has a self-contained plot.

The mystery in this book is an interesting one, with plenty of suspects as David Caine has made enemies of everyone involved with the film: his co-star Ralph Seymour, with whom he’s had a long professional – and often personal – rivalry; the screenwriter Shanika Harris who has known Caine since they were both young eco-warriors; his agent James Aubrey whom he’s been threatening to break ties with; and the runner (production assistant) Izzy Mays, who has lost her job because of Caine. Even the director and the producer have good reasons to want him dead, so there’s a lot for Anthony and Hawthorne to untangle here. The real Horowitz has had experience of working in film and television and I think it shows in his descriptions of life on set.

Halfway through the book, a second mystery begins to unfold, revolving around a crime that took place more than a decade earlier. I found this a bit jarring at first, as it meant getting to know a whole new set of characters, but eventually connections between the two mysteries start to form and the eventual solution gives an explanation for both.

After the previous book, Close to Death, where our two main characters were separated for most of the novel, it was good to see them spending more time together again in this one. Hawthorne has never been the most pleasant of people – he’s secretive, prickly and tactless – but I do think he’s a fascinating character, partly because we know so little about him. In this particular novel, Anthony tries to dig into Hawthorne’s past, in a diversion that takes him to the village of Reeth in the Yorkshire Dales, but still doesn’t manage to shed a lot of extra light on things. Will we ever know the full story? Well, it seems there will be more books in the series, so there’s still hope!

Thanks to Century for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Mill House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

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Translated by Ho-Ling Wong

This is the third of Japanese author Yukito Ayatsuji’s books I’ve read – I loved The Labyrinth House Murders but found The Decagon House Murders disappointing, so I was curious to see what I would think of this one. All three books are part of Ayatsuji’s Bizarre House series and all of them feature the detective Shimada Kiyoshi and an unusual, sinister house designed by the architect Nakamura Seiji. The Mill House Murders was originally published in Japanese in 1988 and is available from Pushkin Press in an English translation.

This book is set entirely within the walls of the Mill House which, like the Decagon House and Labyrinth House, is one of Nakamura’s creations. It’s home to Fujinuma Kiichi, who sustained terrible injuries in a car accident several years earlier and is now confined to a wheelchair, with a mask and gloves covering the damage to his face and hands. Kiichi is the son of the late artist Fujinuma Issei, and although he normally lives a reclusive life with his wife, Yurie, and their servants, once a year he invites a group of acquaintances to the house to look at his father’s paintings.

In September 1985, the group are making their annual visit when several shocking events occur, all in the space of one night: a woman falls to her death from the tower, one of Issei’s paintings vanishes, one of the guests disappears without explanation and a gruesome discovery is made in the furnace room. A solution is suggested by the police, but it’s not very satisfactory and lots of questions remain unanswered. A year later, in September 1986, the same people have gathered at the Mill House again and this time they are joined by Shimada Kiyoshi, a friend of the man who disappeared (and was largely blamed for everything that happened). Shimada believes he can find out the truth about the events of 1985, but he’ll have to hurry before history begins to repeat itself.

The Mill House Murders is another Ayatsuji novel that I thoroughly enjoyed, so it does seem that it’s only The Decagon House that, for whatever reason, didn’t work for me and I’m glad I decided to give him another chance! Although I often find that Japanese mysteries focus very heavily on complex puzzle solving, often involving alibis, timetables and maps, with characters, relationships and motives pushed into the background, this particular book is more balanced. It does have some floor plans, but I was pleased to find that I could follow the plot quite easily without having to study them too carefully, and the characterisation is stronger than in the Decagon and Labyrinth books.

The timeline switches backwards and forwards throughout the book, with one chapter describing the events of 1985 and the next set in the present day of 1986. This could have become confusing, but as long as I paid attention to the chapter headings, I had no problem keeping them straight in my mind. The mystery itself is a clever one; I partly managed to solve it (mainly because some of Seishi Yokomizo’s novels have similar tropes), but I didn’t get it completely right and was content to let Shimada Kiyoshi, the series detective, explain the full solution for me.

The translator, Ho-Ling Wong, also translated the other books I’ve read in this series and does a great job of making everything very clear and readable. I see there’s a fourth book in the series already in print – The Clock House Murders – and another, The Black Cat House Murders, on its way. I’ll look forward to reading both!

Murder Like Clockwork by Nicola Whyte

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This is the second in a series featuring the amateur detective duo Audrey Brooks and Lewis McLennon. I haven’t read the first, 10 Marchfield Square, but I enjoyed this one so much I’m planning to go back and read it, as well as looking out for any future books in the series.

Murder Like Clockwork is set in London and begins with cleaner Audrey Brooks arriving at the house she cleans every Thursday afternoon. She got the job through an agency and has never met the owner of the house, a Russian financier who is rarely in the country but wants someone to wind his collection of clocks and dust his antiques and expensive furniture. On this particular Thursday, Audrey arrives earlier than her usual time but it’s so cold she enters the house anyway and prepares to start work – only to find that she’s not alone. There’s a dead body in one of the bedrooms…with splashes of blood all over the walls and floor, showing that it wasn’t a natural death.

Audrey runs outside to call the police, who arrive twenty minutes later. To her shock, however, she finds herself accused of wasting police time, because there’s no dead body or blood to be seen. Audrey can’t believe it; how can an entire crime scene completely vanish in only twenty minutes? Convinced that she wasn’t imagining things, she contacts her friend, Lewis McLennon, who recently helped her solve another mystery. Lewis is excited to have a second crime to investigate, but how can they even prove that a crime has been committed when the victim and the evidence have disappeared?

I picked up this book after starting and temporarily abandoning two other books that didn’t immediately draw me in. I hoped this would be the quick, entertaining read I needed to help avoid a reading slump – and it was! The characters are well drawn and quirky, the mystery is cleverly plotted without being too difficult to follow and the overall tone is light and humorous. It didn’t really matter that I hadn’t read the previous book as this one works well as a standalone, but I did feel that I didn’t fully understand the role of one of the characters, Celeste, the owner of Marchfield Square, the residential complex where Lewis and Audrey both live. I’m sure I’ll get to know her better when I read the first book.

The novel is written from the points of view of Audrey, Lewis and occasionally Celeste, giving different perspectives on different aspects of the mystery. I found Lewis a particularly interesting character. As a struggling crime writer, he’s enthusiastic about having a real life crime to solve in the hope that it will give him inspiration for his books, but this often leads him to speak without thinking and many people find him annoying. He has a job at a recruitment agency, which he resents because he would rather spend his time writing, and is genuinely surprised when he discovers that other people also have lives outside work and are finding ways to balance their day jobs with pursuing their own dreams. Audrey is a very different personality – she’s warm, friendly and sociable and is happy with her cleaning jobs (although she wishes they were better paid). She and Lewis complement each other perfectly and form a good team.

Although Audrey and Lewis do most of the investigating, I loved the way the other residents of Marchfield Square also get involved. Somehow they all seem to know exactly what’s going on and everyone has an opinion to give or a piece of advice to offer. If you’ve ever watched Only Murders in the Building, that’s what this book reminded me of! I found it very entertaining overall and am looking forward to meeting Lewis and Audrey again.

Thanks to Raven Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Mrs McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie

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The February theme for this year’s Read Christie challenge is ‘beloved characters’ and Christie’s 1952 novel, Mrs McGinty’s Dead, fits that theme perfectly, featuring not only Hercule Poirot but also another of my favourite recurring characters, Ariadne Oliver!

The book begins with Poirot being visited by an old friend, Superintendent Spence, who tells him about a crime that has been committed recently in the village of Broadhinny. It involves the murder of an elderly charwoman, Mrs McGinty, found dead in her own home. A small amount of money has been stolen, seemingly providing a motive for the crime. Mrs McGinty’s lodger, James Bentley, who was behind with his rent, has been arrested and found guilty of murder, but Spence isn’t convinced. His intuition tells him that Bentley is innocent, so he asks Poirot to help him find the true culprit before the wrong man is hanged.

In order to find out more about the crime and the people involved, it’s necessary for Poirot to spend some time in Broadhinny, and he finds himself lodging in a guesthouse run by a young couple, Mr and Mrs Summerhayes. This allows Christie to introduce some humour into the book as Poirot finds that, although Maureen Summerhayes is pleasant and friendly, she is also extremely disorganised, forgetful and untidy – the complete opposite of himself! I’m sure Christie must have had fun writing about Poirot’s experiences in the chaotic house – and also the scenes involving Ariadne Oliver, who just happens to be visiting the same village because a local playwright, Robin Upward, is planning to turn one of her novels featuring the detective Sven Hjerson into a play.

Christie’s crime novelist character, Ariadne Oliver, is thought to be based on Agatha herself and provides lots of opportunities for self-parody. I’m sure Christie must have had a certain Belgian detective in mind every time she has Mrs Oliver complain about Sven Hjerson…

“How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something — and people seem to like it — and then you go on — and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like the maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life.”

The mystery itself is an interesting one, with Poirot discovering that days before her death Mrs McGinty had been reading a newspaper article about four female criminals and had claimed to know that one of them was now living in Broadhinny. The question is which one – and this forms the basis of Poirot’s investigations for the rest of the book. There are lots of suspects and I thought I’d guessed the correct one, but of course I got it wrong and needed to wait for Poirot to explain it all at the end.

Although this has all the ingredients of a great Christie novel, it hasn’t become a personal favourite – but when an author has written as many books as she has, they’re not all going to be favourites! I did enjoy it and am hoping to join in with some more of the monthly reads for Read Christie throughout 2026.

The Final Problem by Arturo Pérez-Reverte – #ReadIndies

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Translated by Frances Riddle

It’s June 1960 and actor Ormond Basil has found himself trapped on the small island of Utakos, near Corfu. He has been invited to join a film director on his yacht to discuss a new project, but stormy weather means they are unable to leave the island until conditions improve. Luckily, there’s a hotel on Utakos where they and a small group of other guests and staff can take shelter until the storm has passed. However, there are no police on the island, so when one of the guests, British tourist Edith Manders, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, it’s up to the others to investigate until help can arrive.

Because Ormond Basil famously played the part of Sherlock Holmes on screen many times, he’s nominated to lead the investigation. No matter how much he explains that he’s only an actor and not really the great detective, everyone else insists that he must know more about solving mysteries than they do. And despite his protests, he does seem to know what he’s doing. With one of the other guests, Spanish crime author Paco Foxá, as his Watson, Basil begins to look for clues and question the suspects – but can he find the killer before another death takes place?

You may have guessed that Ormond Basil is closely based on the real life actor Basil Rathbone, who is for many people the quintessential Sherlock Holmes. I’ve talked before about not liking the current trend for using real people as detectives, but this is slightly different as the character is semi-fictional which gives Pérez-Reverte more scope to have him say and do things that the real Basil may not have done. He’s so obviously supposed to be Basil Rathbone, though, that it seems a bit pointless to pretend that he’s not. Either just calling him Rathbone or creating a completely fictional character would have worked better for me.

The novel is well plotted and the locked room mystery has a solution which is clever without being overly complex. With only a small number of suspects due to the setting, I thought I had guessed who the murderer was, but I was wrong and there was a nice twist towards the end that I hadn’t seen coming. For all Basil’s insistence that he’s not the real Sherlock Holmes, he does turn out to be an excellent detective, with powers of observation and deduction almost as good as the character he played for all those years!

However, I felt that there was far too much name-dropping of other famous actors and directors Basil had worked with, and too many long discussions between Basil and Foxá on the subject of Sherlock Holmes, in which both of them quote constantly from the books and adaptations. This all became a bit tedious and detracted from the mystery. I had a similar problem with the other Pérez-Reverte novel I’ve read, The Dumas Club, in which we’re bombarded with references to Alexandre Dumas’ books, so maybe this is just the way he writes.

I’m not sure if The Final Problem is going to be left as a standalone or if it’s intended as the start of a series; I don’t know if I would want to read any further adventures for Ormond Basil, but I did enjoy this one overall because of the interesting murder mystery. This edition of the novel is available from Atlantic Books, translated into English from the original Spanish by Frances Riddle. As Atlantic Books is an independent publisher, I’m counting this towards Read Indies, hosted this month by Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.

The Bishop Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine

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S.S. Van Dine was a pseudonym used by the American crime writer and art critic Willard Huntington Wright, most famous for his series of mysteries starring the fictional detective Philo Vance. Despite being very successful in the 1920s and 30s, he doesn’t seem as well known today as other Golden Age authors, but I’ve come across references to him in several of the Japanese detective novels I’ve read recently and have been curious about his work. Now that I’ve read one of his books, I can see why he was so popular in Japan: it seems that his books are ‘puzzle mysteries’ and inspired the Japanese honkaku style.

The Bishop Murder Case was published in 1929 and is the fourth book in the Philo Vance series. It’s definitely not necessary to have read any of the previous books first (they are mentioned a few times but there are no spoilers). The book is set in Manhattan and gets off to a promising start, with the first murder happening almost immediately. The victim, Joseph Cochrane Robin, has been shot dead with a bow and arrow, and the name of the main suspect is Sperling – which just happens to be the German word for sparrow. If you know your nursery rhymes you’ll remember the line: “Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin.” Coincidence? Philo Vance doesn’t think so and he’s proved right when several newspapers receive a note explaining the nursery rhyme reference, signed only as ‘The Bishop’.

As more deaths follow, all staged to look like nursery rhymes, New York’s District Attorney, John Markham, asks Vance to use his experience of human nature and his knowledge of literature and logic to help solve the mystery. With the murders all taking place in one small area of the city, Vance is convinced the culprit is someone from or connected with the household of Professor Dillard, but can he correctly identify the Bishop before the killing spree continues?

I loved the premise of this book – the nursery rhyme idea was fun and would later be used by Agatha Christie and other authors – but once Vance and Markham began their investigations I quickly discovered that this was going to be the sort of detective novel I tend to struggle with. There’s a lot of focus on times, distances and alibis and lots of discussions of mathematics, physics, psychology and chess, with things that interest me more like character development and motives pushed into the background. I found Vance himself very annoying, a pretentious, foppish know-it-all, similar in some ways to Allingham’s Albert Campion or Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey but without any of their charm. The book is narrated by a friend of Vance’s, whose name is Van Dine like the author himself, but although he accompanies Vance as he investigates, he never seems to actually speak or play any active part in the story at all, which I found very odd. His role seems to be purely to observe the other characters and relay information to the reader.

This book wasn’t a success with me, then, but I’m sure other readers will enjoy it much more than I did, particularly if you like mysteries that involve a lot of complex puzzle solving and logic. I doubt I’ll be looking for more books in the series, but I’m still glad I tried this one anyway!

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.