Bush, Christopher - Dancing Death (1931)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

One of the author’s most impressive jobs, demonstrating what he is capable of when he puts effort into it. The snow-bound country house, complete with fancy dress ball at which two (or three? or four?) harlequins confuse the issue of murder and burglary, is freshly handled, with several good clues and characters. The plot is one of Bush’s best, showing how coincidence can work in the book’s favour to produce a catastrophe, while the finishing chapters, in which Travers’s detection makes sense of the jumbled mysteries of the first section, are extremely satisfying, allowing both police and reader to be present at the capture of a particularly ingenious criminal.