Omit Flowers

Rating:
Summary: Include Relatives
Review: A wealthy widow is grooming her newly acquired trophy husband to take over the family business (a chain of restaurants), much to the chagrin of her five children and her deceased husband's business manager. When the new husband is discovered with a knife in his back, Inspector Cramer arrests the business manager. As a favor to a friend, Nero Wolfe agrees to prove the business manager's innocence. The flying fickle finger of suspicion points to one of the five greedy children, and Wolfe sets out to discover which one. But how to get the tightly knit family to agree to come to his house after midnight to be interviewed by Wolfe? Can Archie achieve the impossible and haul them in? Can Wolfe untie the Gordian Knot of lies, false clues, and withheld information?

Wolfe turns in his usual masterful performance, but he arrives at his conclusions in uncharacteristic fashion. He usually solves cases based on sound conclusions drawn from hard evidence. In this case his conclusions were more intuitive than deductive. When, in the final scene, Inspector Cramer takes the guilty party to the pokey, I could not help but ask myself, "Where's the proof?"

Listening to the tape as I took my half hour evening walk, I lost track of time and didn't return home until the tape was completed and the case solved.

Rating:
Summary: Misled but enjoyed
Review: This, like all Stout's works, is very enjoyable and a very good story to drive with. My only complaint is that it is not unabridged as advertised though I suspected a mistake when I ordered it. I liked everything else - the reader is very good and of course the story lots of fun.