We know who the victim will be pretty early on, even though it's halfway through the book before the odious woman gets her comeuppance. A rich widow hires a man to come to her country home and find out who among the residents (relatives of her dead husband) has been destroying her possessions. The first half of the story revolves around that plot, and acts more of a way to get all the characters and their quirks established. The narrator is the young man looking for the vandal, although after the murder the focus shifts to the policeman trying to unravel the mystery of the locked room. The solution is clever (with diagrams and maps, of course), although as with most of these golden age locked room mysteries, a bit too complicated to have actually worked. But it's a fun ride for the 200-odd pages.

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