There seems a movement nowadays to cast Gladys Mitchell as the last of the body-in-the-library practitioners: ‘good writing, careful plotting and educated wit,’ as her latest jacket says. Not so. Grant the good writing, but otherwise Miss Mitchell has always (and this is her sixty-second book) stood splendidly apart from her crime-club confrères in total originality—even when, as today, there are almost none left to stand apart from...

One does not expect a writer to break new ground in her ninth decade, but the final dream sequence (not, I hasten to say, a substitute for a properly deduced solution) has an eeriness all its own. On page 167, too, two of the characters make love, which I don’t remember in a Mitchell novel before. It is almost as if she were recalling the Dick Francis of Risk. Perhaps it was a mistake to have a third witchlike person in the cast, the Chaucerian Aunt Eglantine, but she and Mrs Bradley get on famously.