The house at Devil's Neck

Mead's fourth historical puzzler featuring retired magician Joseph Spector (after Cabaret Macabre) is a fiendishly clever tour de force. In 1939, Spector joins a busload of passengers, including a medium and a reporter, en route to a legendary haunted house on the English coast. The gothic dwelling was reportedly the site of a 17th-century confrontation between a witch-finder and a demon-summoning alchemist that ended with the former's neck broken. Later converted into a military hospital, the house has just been opened to the public. Soon after Spector and his party settle in for their visit, they hold a séance, and then someone is found hanging in their locked room, a death that Spector quickly classifies as murder. Then the causeway floods, trapping guests in the eerie house with a killer--possibly a supernatural one. Mead artfully dials up the suspense notch by notch, keeping readers off-balance all the way through to the masterful conclusion, which again proves that he's a fastidious student of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. This superlative series remains in top form. Agent: Lorella Belli, Lorella Belli Literary. (July)

On the eve of World War II, a motley crew intent on reconnecting with the past motors out to a former hospital for servicemen from the Great War, where two impossible crimes will abruptly diminish their numbers. After surviving enough wartime calamities to have killed most soldiers, Maurice Bailey, blind and mute, finally succumbed to his unspeakable injuries a year after the war ended. The last day of August 1939 finds his mother, Virginia Bailey, riding with spiritualist Madame Adaline La Motte and her companion, reporter Imogen Drabble, to the eponymous house where her beloved son breathed his last in the hope of summoning his spirit. Professional magician Joseph Spector has a different agenda: resolving the mystery surrounding the Aitken Inheritance, which passed from Dominic Edgecomb to his brother, Rodney, when Dominic went down with theTitanic, only to return miraculously a year later in a futile bid to reclaim his legacy from Rodney, who insists that the claimant was an imposter. As the travelers, whose numbers also include psychic investigator Francis Tulp and Det. Walter Judd, approach their destination, Scotland Yard Inspector George Flint and Sgt. Jerome Hook discover the body of Rodney Edgecomb dead in a room they've had under uninterrupted surveillance. Is it really the suicide it seems to be? And who will become the next victim? Mead piles on enough complications, red herrings, misdirections, impersonations, and period details, from rumors of wartime trysts and betrayals to The Stepney Lad, a dummy Maurice fashioned by hand, to fill a whole shelf of Golden Age puzzlers. The most confounding, mystifying, mind-boggling 24 hours most readers will ever encounter in fiction or real life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.