A beautiful and sad book with a nice clean plot and only a few Innesian diversions of his usual sort. The murder of a woman dying of cancer and the supposed suicide of her husband set up to look like remorse for mercy killing. The story takes a long time to end up with murder, but that is for the purpose of setting up the wonderful relationship between the two victims during this awful period. Also a movement with the times for this author: drugs and teenage pregnancy. However, Appleby allows the murderer to kill himself, as so often happens in Golden Age mysteries -- probably authors had reasonable doubts then about the justice of judicial hanging. What somebody does with a tape recorder here is very moving (though not what the murderer did with it). Excellent story.
Wyatt James
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