place just before Christmas 1938, at the country estate of Justice Giles Drury, a man who has made many enemies during his career. One enemy is Victor Silvius, a young man who attacked the judge a few years earlier and was confined to a mental institution. Silvius was convinced the judge had murdered Silvius’ girlfriend in an incident at the estate that was officially labeled a suicide. Now, the judge has received threatening letters, and his wife asks Spector to figure out the source of the letters. Ironically, Silvius’ sister is convinced the judge is trying to frame Silvius and asks Inspector Flint to investigate.

Shortly after Justice Drury, his various family members, and Spector arrive at the estate, two murders take place. Both of them are apparently impossible crimes right up Spector’s alley. In the first, witnesses find a body in a rowboat in the middle of a small frozen lake. The victim had been stabbed, but the ice was too thin for anyone to walk across. Further, the suspects all had alibis for the time before the lake froze over. The second murder is a traditional locked room puzzle. A man is shot with a shotgun (that has since disappeared) in a second-story room with one locked door and one window that’s jammed shut and can’t be opened.

Several other murders occur in Cabaret Macabre, although none are of the “impossible” variety. By the book’s end, I was reminded of Bette Davis’s quote at the end of the Peter Ustinov version of Death on the Nile. Davis instructs her companion, Maggie Smith: “Time to go. This place is beginning to resemble a mortuary.” Spector explains all the deaths to Flint and other characters in bits and pieces over the last 20 percent of the novel. The process is like peeling an onion. Spector “solves” one mystery, which reveals additional details about the story. In the next chapter, he reveals more answers. Then the same thing happens again. By the end of the book, I thought the author had exhausted every permutation regarding the crimes. I was wrong. The last revelation occurred in the book’s last five pages and caught me entirely by surprise.

Cabaret Macabre adheres to the rules of the Golden Age “fair play” genre, as the author points out to readers. He adds a cast of characters and maps of the judge’s estate and surrounding property in the introductory materials. The book also includes several footnotes that reveal the exact page where the author reveals key clues Spector later describes. (These footnotes may confuse those reading digital versions of the book.) The author also borrows Ellery Queen’s trademarked “Challenge to the Reader.” In his novels, Ellery Queen notified readers at some point that they had all the information needed to solve the crime and challenged them to do so. Similarly, Tom Mead inserts an “Interlude: Wherein the Reader’s Attention Is Respectfully Requested.” There, he writes, “[T] here remains only one solution. A single answer to this concatenation of puzzles and impossibilities. Spector has found it. Have you?”

I must confess, I hadn’t found most of the answers. I pretty much worked out how the body in the canoe wound up in the lake, but not who the killer was. The rest of the mysteries stumped me. But as Joseph Spector revealed his solution, I kept thinking: “That’s why this particular character or detail was mentioned.” By the end of the book, I realized the author had played fair with me and that I had lots of fun trying to figure out whodunit, howdunit, and whydunit.

However, I also had the nagging feeling the author had gone overboard in Cabaret Macabre. Using the stage magician analogy, the author made his illusion too elaborate so that readers were sometimes befuddled rather than astounded. As a result, the literary value of the book was diminished. Other than Spector, the characters were uninteresting stereotypes whose individual characteristics and idiosyncrasies existed solely to drive the plot. I didn’t believe a single plot element was plausible. Fortunately, Joseph Spector, just about the only character who doesn’t die or get arrested throughout the three books in the series, is a more entertaining character. He’s a performer whose time has passed, both in terms of his physical dexterity and the public’s taste in entertainment. (Spector still performs and explains magic tricks in front of Inspector Flint, including one clever trick in this book.) How he accepts this reality is one of the few believable character notes in the book.

Cabaret Macabre has a limited audience. It won’t appeal to romantic suspense or hardboiled detective fans or those who thrive on books that use forensics to solve cases. And its period setting (which explains why the police can’t use modern scientific techniques) is a turnoff for some. But for those who have memorized Agatha Christie after a dozenth reading of Murder on the Orient Express, this novel is a refreshing change of pace and a chance to match wits with a new puzzle-making writer. The author and I bid those readers “Wilkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!” to this cabaret.

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.