I wonder what Grimes was thinking as she finished this novel. She takes a delightful amateur detective story and spoils it with a graphic account of a sadistic child murder. In the final chapters, she mixes scenes of unbearable cruelty with local pub amusements that are not funny in the context of the tragedy we are reading about, and add nothing to the story. Richard Jury shows up only long enough to lose interest in all the plots and subplots. And after being actively involved in the entire mystery, Melrose departs the scene before it is unconvincingly resolved with one of the perpetrators in the sadistic murders going unpursued.