This is a courtroom drama about a locked room mystery. The solution of how the murder was done is clever enough, but the identity of the culprit felt kind of boring. The pace of the book was slow. This may be because of the courtroom setup, where everything is happening in retrospect. There were one or two sections that were mildly amusing (see my Kindle highlights).
I'm hoping to try another John Dickson Carr sometime that's a little more zippy. ( )

Unless you have a pretty high tolerance for "hilarious" courtroom highjinks à la Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution you may find it overlong and less than gripping. The solution lacks the elegant simplicity of the best works in the genre. ( )

This has the magnificent Sir Henry Merrivale as barrister for the defense, which is a plus. It also has a defendant who confesses to murder in open court to prevent tho production in evidence of an obscene photo of the woman he loves. On the negative side, it has an improbable murder method and an emotionally unsatisfactory villain. ( )

I've been busy and tired so, as I often do, have been re-reading a swag of classic crime novels for relaxation. This was the first Carter Dickson novel I ever read and, though I don't find it in the same league as the work of the Queens of Crime, it's a very interesting and enjoyable "locked room" mystery starring the larger than life (in all senses of the word) Sir Henry Merrivale (or HM, or "The Old Man"). The solution is rather far fetched, but the story and characters are compelling, as is the unexpectedly racy motivation behind the crime - which has echoes in the present day world of sexting. I'd recommend it to classic crime buffs. ( )

In this novel, as in so many others by Carr/Dickson, it's not only a question of whodunit as whyd(s)hedoit, howd(s)hedoit, whatwasthevictimdoing, whoslyin', and multiple other problems. The solution(s) are accessible to the reader, but only through painstaking parsing of just about every pronouncement by every character and careful analysis of the implication of nearly every seemingly trivial detail of description. In fact, the trivial details are the ones to be scrutinized most carefully, since they only exist to enlighten and mystify. In other words, this book and its kin are games, precursers of today's video games, with twists and turns throughout and just about as much character development as Super Mario. ( )