Green Shiver (Rue Morgue Vintage Mysteries)
While Clason's 10th and final classic whodunit to feature historian and amateur detective Theocritus Lucius Westborough doesn't involve an impossible murder behind locked doors, the crimes Westborough must solve are sufficiently puzzling to challenge his considerable intellect. Chinese jade collector Jocasta Vayne hires the sleuth, who's vacationing near Los Angeles shortly before WWII, to investigate the theft of a valuable statue from her collection, the Goddess of the Green Shiver. Vayne induces Westborough to pose as a guest at her estate, in an attempt to identify the thief. The ante gets upped when Vayne's boorish son, Eugene, and a self-styled psychic, Madame Wu, are found shot to death shortly after Wu attempted to use her gifts to trace the criminal. While the police quickly arrest the pair who found the bodies, Eugene's widow and an Irish war correspondent, Westborough is skeptical of their guilt, and employs his encyclopedic knowledge to crack the case. The clues to the guilty party are all fairly displayed, making this an intelligent mystery reminiscent of John Dickson Carr's Gideon Fell series.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.