Ngaio Marsh. The Nursing Home Murder (1935) Another of the early, pre-Troy Alleyn stories, in which Alleyn must once again uncover not only the murderer, but also an implausibly ingenious method of committing the crime; a vintage puzzle mystery, in other words. But the atmosphere is right, the characters of sufficient substance to sustain interest, and only the mawkishness of the love story that seems to provide motive for the murder flaws an otherwise well-constructed and -told classic whodunit. In reading these early Alleyns, one tends to forget that they were contemporary books, not historical novels, which they have become by the passage of 60 or more years. *** (2004)
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