A preposterous tale that can only be excused by the fact that it was the author's apprentice work, obviously to Sayers and Christie. The situation is wholly generic: murder done under cover of `The Murder Game,' and all the suspects have cast-iron alibis. The murderer's is clever rather than convincing, but even this is undone by the complete absence of clues. It is not, however, the central murder that damns the novel, but the sheer badness of the extraneous elements. The facetiousness is embarrassing: Alleyn and Bathgate are at the nadir of their ingenuousness, giggling coyly like a pair of schoolgirls, while the passages with grubby brats are irritating in the extreme. The final straw is the intrusive and irrelevant "Russian element," which badly dates the tale; indeed, the preposterous bratsvo-torture scenes are reminiscent of Walling and Wallace at their worst. The previous owner showed his disappointment by scribbling Cyrillics in the margins.