Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy
Life has been a little stressful lately, what with my company going belly-up and then righting itself again and some other, more private matters, that I have had singularly little inclination to get started on the more solid volumes on my to-read pile, preferring instead to read a simple, silly detective story. So that's why you're reading about Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy (or IFATST) instead of Lud in the Mist.
It's funny, but the story of IFATST has proven to be instantly forgettable, because I had all but confused it with Trent's Own Case. IFATST is a plain old manor-house murder mystery with the twist that the manor house is burned down. It is rather well written, in the old-fashioned, solid kind of English that's so hard to come by nowadays. The characters are sketchy, which is to be expected with this kind of mystery novel; the puzzle is everything.
The puzzle is quite nice, indeed, and I didn't guess the complete intrigue until the end.
Inspector French, though, is a crashing bore. And he doesn't become any more charming even if the author were say he's charming twice on every page, instead of only one. Really, you don't want to count the occasions where he's described with 'And with his customary charm, he...'. Anyway, this one was quite worth its fifty cents.