THE MURDER WHEEL

Mead returns to the golden-age world of locked rooms, impossible crimes, and 1930s England with a triple-barreled puzzle.

It’s a trying week for Edmund Ibbs. The newly anointed solicitor has just stepped into a leading role in the defense of Carla Dean, whose ride on a Ferris wheel with her husband, bank manager Dominic Dean, ended with him fatally shot. Carla swears that she didn’t kill him, but who else could have committed the murder as the pair circled alone above the earth? Ibbs, an enthusiastic amateur magician, welcomes the chance the impossible crime brings to rub shoulders with Joseph Spector, who so handsomely produced a solution to Death and the Conjuror (2022); with Professor Paolini, the prestidigitator who’s performing nightly at the Pomegranate Theatre; and with whomever wrote The Master of Manipulation, a tell-all handbook whose pseudonymous byline turns out to conceal the identity of a wholly unexpected author. But worse is yet to come. First, a corpse tumbles out of a suit of armor that was supposed to provide a much more upbeat surprise during Paolini’s performance. Then, summoned to Paolini’s dressing room, Ibbs is knocked unconscious and awakens to find himself in a sealed room with the magician’s corpse, the murder weapon literally glued to Ibbs’ hand. It will take not only a good deal of slack from Inspector George Flint, but some seriously extended explanations and reexplanations of these impossible, and impossibly stylized, murders before Mead is ready to detonate a final surprise that’s well worth waiting for.

Even readers who live to match wits with canny authors and detectives are likely to be outwitted by this one.