LESTRADE AND THE DEADLY GAME

The Games are afoot—the 1908 London Olympics, that is. But England’s pride in hosting the Games is threatened by a series of murders that begins with an apparent suicide: the shooting of 2nd Lt. Anstruther Fitzgibbon inside a locked room. Regardless of the evidence, Fitzgibbon’s father insists that it’s murder, and since father is the Marquess of Bolsolver, he soon has the ear of Supt. Sholto Lestrade. Long reviled by Conan Doyle as the police detective even dumber than Dr. Watson, Lestrade leaps at the chance to connect Fitzgibbon’s death with the stabbing of Hans-Rudiger Hesse, a German political journalist in London to cover the Games, and the poisoning of yachtsman William Hemingway. And Lestrade’s instincts are all too sound, as the sequel will show: a total of nine murders, eight of the victims trained athletes. Why would anyone want to cut off the flower of English youth, and why did the killer interrupt the chain to kill unathletic Rudi Hesse? The episodic nature of the case makes Lestrade slog through a ream of red herrings and circumstantial details to get to the answers. Trow adds cameos by G.K. Chesterton, Gen. Robert Baden-Powell, and Lytton Strachey—but not by Sherlock Holmes, whose very existence Lestrade denies. Understated humor and brisk pacing are the main draws in this fifth of Trow’s sixteen Lestrade mysteries, first published in the UK in 1990. Hard-core Holmesians need not apply.