Hog's Back Mystery

Rating:
Summary: Another fascinating puzzle for Inspector French to Solve.
Review: Of her fellow practitioner in the "Golden Age" of detective fiction, Agatha Christie wrote, "Then there is Freeman Wills Crofts with his wonderful timetables". Well, Crofts and his wonderful timetables can be enjoyed in this 1933 mystery which takes its name from a ridge of land in Surrey, England. To this part of Surrey come two women to stay with a third who is married to a retired doctor. All the women were at school together, and soon they are arranging to meet others former school friends living nearby. Add the obligatory retired colonel, a neighbouring household where live the young widow and a nephew of a recently deceased elderly gentleman, a few suggestions of extra-marital affairs, and you'll deduce that a murder is not many pages away.

Actually several disappearances precede the discovery of murder, disappearances that are investigated by Crofts' indefatigable detective Inspector French of Scotland Yard.

Those who have disappeared prove so difficult to trace, and alibis so hard to crack, that French and the reader need to work and watch keenly through some slow moving investigation. Persistence is rewarded, however, and Crofts is seen to have devised yet another fascinating puzzle to solve.

Rating:
Summary: Another fascinating puzzle for Inspector French to Solve.
Review: Of her fellow practitioner in the "Golden Age" of detective fiction, Agatha Christie wrote, "Then there is Freeman Wills Crofts with his wonderful timetables". Well, Crofts and his wonderful timetables can be enjoyed in this 1933 mystery which takes its name from a ridge of land in Surrey, England. To this part of Surrey come two women to stay with a third who is married to a retired doctor. All the women were at school together, and soon they are arranging to meet others former school friends living nearby. Add the obligatory retired colonel, a neighbouring household where live the young widow and a nephew of a recently deceased elderly gentleman, a few suggestions of extra-marital affairs, and you'll deduce that a murder is not many pages away.

Actually several disappearances precede the discovery of murder, disappearances that are investigated by Crofts' indefatigable detective Inspector French of Scotland Yard.

Those who have disappeared prove so difficult to trace, and alibis so hard to crack, that French and the reader need to work and watch keenly through some slow moving investigation. Persistence is rewarded, however, and Crofts is seen to have devised yet another fascinating puzzle to solve.