The Viaduct Murder

Four men finish a round of golf at the Paston Oatvile Dormy-house, their clubs packed and their minds on nothing more pressing than the nineteenth hole. Then someone notices a body slumped near the viaduct. The victim has been stabbed through the heart, yet his pockets contain nothing to establish who he is or why anyone would want him dead. Mordaunt Reeves and Alexander Gordon, two gentlemen with too much curiosity and too little sense, take it upon themselves to solve the puzzle. But as they dig into the golf club's well-heeled membership, they find that everyone has something to hide: forged identities, secret marriages, vanished heirs. Ronald Knox, the master of the fair-play detective puzzle, constructs his debut mystery with the precision of a logician and the wit of a satirist. The result is a gloriously tangled web of alibis and aliases, where the solution has been hiding in plain sight all along, visible to the attentive reader who can separate the clues from the red herrings.