The House at Devil's Neck
A Locked-Room Mystery
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
In this latest locked room mystery from the author of Cabaret Macabre, amateur sleuth Joseph Spector pits his knowledge of stage magic against the seemingly supernatural when a seance at an isolated old hospital turns deadly.
An apparent suicide in a London townhouse uncannily mirrors a similar incident from twenty-five years ago, prompting Scotland Yard's George Flint to delve deep into the past in search of the solution to a long-forgotten mystery.
Meanwhile, Joseph Spector travels with a coach party through the rainy English countryside to visit an allegedly haunted house on a lonely island called Devil’s Neck. The house, first built by a notorious alchemist and occultist, was later used as a field hospital in the First World War before falling into disrepair. The visitors hold a seance to conjure the spirit of a long-dead soldier. But when a storm floods the narrow causeway connecting Devil’s Neck to the mainland, they find themselves stranded in the haunted house. Before long, the guests begin to die one by one, and it seems that the only possible culprit is the phantom soldier.
Flint's and Spector's investigations are in fact closely linked, but it is only when the duo are reunited at the storm-lashed Devil's Neck that the truth is finally revealed. Tom Mead once again creates a brilliant homage to John Dickson Carr and the Golden Age of mysteries with this intricately plotted puzzle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
