From the cover copy, this is the seventh or eighth book in a well-loved series. I will not be searching out more of them.

I was simply not able to believe that these two sleiths were experienced, because they were both TSTL (too stupid to live). They randomly did stupid things, and were shocked, SHOCKED, to find out that this created trouble. They overlooked obvious things, like leaving the plot ticket in an unguarded house after publicly putting it there was a bad idea. One of them recklessly ran around trying to attract the attention and animosity of the villain (to flush him out - really, it was deliberate) and then was shocked that there was a response.

In addition, I didn't think it was well-written. There is a whole sub-plot that seems to exist only to get the detectives to work separately, which has nothing to do with the main mystery, and which is resolved by casually saying that an offscreen character (possibly someone from a previous volume in the series?) can take care of it. On top of this, I didn't like the characters, particularly, and if you take away the "X said" "Y said" tags, there was no way to tell who was speaking. (This means that all the dialogue sounded the same, there were no distinct, individual voices.)

In short, a mess. ( )