So they keep it a secret from their friends and families-in fact, Harriet barely even admits it to herself, focusing instead on her grueling hours as a surgical resident. They’ve been part of the same boisterous friend group since college, and they know that their breakup will devastate the others and make things more than a little awkward. Wyn Connor and Harriet Kilpatrick were the perfect couple-until Wyn dumped Harriet for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand. Mead faithfully replicates all the loving artifice and teasing engagement of golden-age puzzlers in this superior pastiche.Įxes pretend they’re still together for the sake of their friends on their annual summer vacation. Luckily, Flint’s friend Joseph Spector is a professional magician whose eyes are alert to every deception and whose experience with illusions of every kind allows him to pierce the veil at Dollis Hill with a panache that would make Carr proud. The waters are further muddied by the equally miraculous theft of a valuable painting from the home of theatrical impresario Benjamin Teasel and a murder at Dufresne Court, where Stenhouse lives. Claude Weaver, Patient C, is a suspense novelist subject to blackouts. Della Cookson, Patient B, is a kleptomaniac actress currently starring in Miss Death, which has just opened at the Pomegranate Theatre. Floyd Stenhouse, Patient A, is a Philharmonic violinist tormented by dreams of snakes. Lidia Rees, and her all-but-fiance, playboy financier Marcus Bowman, but it isn’t long before Inspector George Flint, still baffled by the killer’s ability to escape a room locked from the inside, turns instead to the three patients the dead man had taken on since arriving in London. Suspicion immediately falls on his daughter, psychologist Dr. Anselm Rees in Dollis Hill, the uneasy members of his household contrive to enter his locked study and find the Viennese-born psychologist with his throat cut.

Shortly after a mysterious and unexpected late-night visitor leaves the home of Dr. Mead’s debut novel is a valentine to the locked-room puzzles of John Dickson Carr, to whom it is dedicated.

Death and the conjuror