Review: A delightful humorous tale of an impossible crime
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 7, 2011
Retuning from a thirtieth wedding anniversary in this 99 cent for amazon-kindle-owners novel, Inspector Zhang and his wife see a woman standing on a roof top yelling that she is going to jump and kill herself. He tries to talk her out of jumping, but she repeats her threat. When asked, she identifies herself as Celia. Then she falls from the roof. It seems like a clear case of suicide until the medical examiner informs the inspector that the woman did not die from the fall, but from drowning in regular, not sea water. Inspector Zhang was almost overjoyed. There are over 400 suicides in Singapore where he lived and worked, but very few murders. This was clearly an impossible situation and an obvious murder. Inspector Zhang enjoyed mystery books, especially by John Dickenson Carr who wrote about impossible mysteries, such as closed room murders. Now he had such a case to solve.Celia was the wife of an airport baggage handler and lived with her husband in a government construction for the near poor. Her husband wore a goatee and Inspector Zhang told his sergeant that he never trusted men with goatees. Zhang examined Celia, her possessions, and her clothes. He discovered something strange. She was wearing an expensive dress and underclothes, but had cheap shoes and an imitation expensive pocket book. I leave further details of this delightful and humorous tale and how Inspector Zhang solves the impossible case for readers to enjoy.