The House at Devil’s Neck: A Locked-Room Mystery (Joseph Spector Series)
In this largely entertaining continuation of Tom Mead’s well-liked series of locked-room mysteries, sleuth and retired magician Joseph Spector accepts an invitation to a séance in a remote house that is said to be haunted by the alchemist who built it. Even more haunting is the house’s more recent past, when it was used as a rehabilitation facility for grievously injured veterans of the Great War.
The distraught mother of a patient who killed himself has invited Spector to expose a medium who claims to be in contact with her dead son. During the séance, another guest goes missing and is later found dead, apparently having hanged himself. At the same time, Spector’s ongoing foil in the series, DI George Flint, investigates a different, equally macabre suicide. Both Flint and Spector uncover evidence that neither crime can be a suicide. When the house where Spector is staying is cut off by a storm and a third impossible crime follows, the tale settles comfortably into the familiar cadences of a classic country house mystery.
Mead demonstrates his customary expertise at debunking fraudulent mediums’ tricks, but mystery purists may balk at his overly detailed attention to such mechanics at the expense of more artful misdirection. Readers may also grow frustrated at Mead’s tacking on several twists at the end, as if he was dissatisfied with his original solution. Still, The House at Devil’s Neck remains a solidly constructed Golden Age pastiche.
