also released as Mist and Snow - in UK ( )

2014 review:
A fun mystery with a young Inspector Appleby. I haven't been able to pinpoint any literary pastiche this time (but maybe I just don't recognize it) but the there are plenty of suspects and motives which kept me guessing up to the very end. ( )

Hilarious, dry dry DRY humor, a bit reminiscent of Terry Pratchett. The denouement in this particular mystery is absolutely absurd -- indescribably funny. Michael Innes is not about "who dunnit", he's about words and language (he was a English professor at Oxford, among other grand places, and it shows): description, characterization, and all with tongue firmly in cheek.
I advise reading Innes on an e-reader, because one of the author's quirks is to use archaic terms that no one has used for two hundred years, so it's a real convenience to be able to just click the word for a definition. After a while, this becomes one of the things you love about his books. ( )

The book is interesting even if it is a bit slow. The characters are interesting but it takes quite a long time before the action starts.
I'm a fan of Golden Age mystery but it took quite an effort to keep on reading and sometimes had to go back in order to see if I understood everything.
Quite a good book but it did not age well and it is more an interesting picture of an era than an engaging mystery.
Many thanks to Ipso Books and Netgalley ( )

Tedious and pedestrian

I found this self-indulgent and rambling. It is less a crime/mystery, more an intellectual exercise in devising as many solutions as possible from an obscure crime within a limited cast. The book begins with chapters of philosophising wrapped around meagre information about Belrive Priory and the extended family who are gathering there. These family members are variously eccentric, silly, juvenile, self-obsessed or pompous — in short, I found it impossible to raise an atom of interest in any one of them. Three visitors are added to the mix - one who is a bit of a cypher, another who proves to be the most interesting of the lot, and finally Inspector Appleby. There is no sense of realism about the investigation that follows.

Michael Innes was a professor of English. He had also studied psychoanalysis. And boy, do both show in his writing style. I found it tedious in the extreme, and the only reason I finished it was that I had been sent a free copy in exchange for a review. My one thought when I got to the end was a disbelieving, "Good grief!" ( )