Lock your door and enjoy.
Fourteen stories, originally published between 1930 and 1949, in which valuables are stolen from impregnable strongholds, victims are poisoned through inexplicable means, and, of course, murderers escape from rooms locked from the inside.
As Penzler warns in his introduction, readers “will inevitably be disappointed” by magic tricks whose logistics are eventually, and necessarily, explained in detail. The greatest feat of prestidigitation here, in fact, may be the lack of overlap with Penzler’s monumental 2014 collection The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries. Although 10 authors are represented in both volumes, only one story, Ellery Queen’s novella The House of Haunts, also known as The Lamp of God, is duplicated—and no wonder, since this tale of a house that disappears overnight continues to impress despite its wild implausibilities. The other extended story, John Dickson Carr’s The Third Bullet, is cluttered, convoluted, and much less sharp than Carr’s many locked-room novels. The rest of the stories, good but not great, include Cornell Woolrich’s brisk, efficient “Murder at the Automat,” MacKinlay Kantor’s brief, pungent “The Light at Three O’Clock,” Manly Wade Wellman’s frantically paced “Murder Among Magicians,” Fredric Brown’s “Whistler’s Murder,” most notable for its wonderful last line, Mignon G. Eberhart’s not-so-impossible “The Calico Dog,” C. Daly King’s how-did-he-escape puzzle “The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem,” Craig Rice’s “His Heart Could Break,” in which lawyer John J. Malone identifies the person who hanged his jailed client, Erle Stanley Gardner’s “The Exact Opposite,” a rapid-fire tale of professional thief Lester Leith, and Anthony Boucher’s inverted tale of time-traveling murder. Best in show: Clayton Rawson’s “Off the Face of the Earth,” a deft double disappearance solved and partly executed by the Great Merlini, and Joseph Commings’ “Fingerprint Ghost,” which asks which suspect shrugged off a straitjacket to kill a magician.
Lock your door and enjoy.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61316-328-3
Page Count: 508
Publisher: American Mystery Classics
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
