This isn't the London mystery readers have come to know since the days of Collins and A Conan Doyle--it's london today, the social structure isn't as tidy, the fog as chilling or the detectives as omniscient. Inspector Harry James, who bowed in A Provenance of Death, deals with mixed mod rogues and quippy jet set types, but he uses the oldest of final chapter tell-em-how-whodunit techniques to beat the corkscrews out of his plot for his readers.