MURDER ON THE THIRTEENTH

More calendar-linked skullduggery for Inspector Albert Tretheway of Fort York, Canada (A Good Year for Murder, 1987--not reviewed), as 1943 is ushered in by a mysterious wax-burning--the work of a witch?--during a blackout on January 13. The violence escalates on the 13th of February, March, and April, claiming a mutilated rabbit (minus a left hind foot), then successive members of Fort York's Air Raid Patrol, poisoned and burned and pushed from a height. The characters--the nosy reporter, the sincere but opinionated pest, the resident expert on the occult--make scarcely an impression before their demise, but Eddenden has a light touch with his wartime town and its denizens, and Tretheway's identification of the probable final date and victim are clever. The climactic unmasking itself, though, adds surprisingly little to our understanding of the killer.