This appears to be Tom Mead’s first novel, but he has written much short fiction, and this does not read like a debut. I was particularly fond of the psychological slant to the storyline, with the victim being a psychiatrist and the suspects including three of his patients and his psychiatrically-trained daughter. I love any exploration of the quirks and shadows of the human mind, and here we get glimpses into anxiety, kleptomania and possibly hints of sociopathy… so very intriguing trying to work out how each individual psychological profile might match up to the crimes under investigation. I’m a huge fan of live theatre—everything from experimental drama to musicals. Death and the Conjuror features a fictional West End theatre called the Pomegranate, which gave me the opportunity to delve into the history of London’s famous theatre district. I had great fun basing certain characters on real-life historical figures, and hopefully eagle-eyed readers will be able to work out who’s who. What are you working on now? the characters' behavior only makes sense if you squint and also accept that they all have strange psychological issues.

Is Tom Mead a time traveler? Death and the Conjuror is such a wonderful Golden Age-style mystery that it is hard to believe he wrote it in 2022! If, indeed, he is a time traveler, I hope he takes this book with him; I am sure it will be widely enjoyed. It's 1930s London and there is a murder. Psychiatrist Anselm Rees has been murdered and the murderer has disappeared under impossible circumstances. What we have here is a closed room mystery but actually there is more than one closed room mystery before the story is over. It's the job of Scotland Yard Inspector George Flint to find the murderer and when confronted with the impossibility of the crime he calls on retired stage magician-turned-part-time sleuth Joseph Spector. The epilogue didn't do it for me, however. I think the initial solution was perfectly satisfying and the author didn't need to introduce a last-minute twist. The characters are well depicted so that they instantly become people the reader is invested in, enhancing the total enjoyment in reading The Murder Wheel. I loved the way dialogue helped uncover who they are as people, and not having read the first Joseph Spector book, Death and the Conjurer, didn’t detract at all, but has made me determined to catch up with it because I enjoyed The Murder Wheel so much. I also fully appreciated the scope for reencountering some of the characters in future stories even though this narrative is brilliantly and satisfactorily concluded.I loved all the characters. Touching on the different types of psychomachia was clever and made the characters more tangible. Della really was a conundrum and I would have actually liked to have known more about her for my own curiosity. The only character I didn't much care for was the daughter Lidia. I think she was deliberately made unlikeable which shows how much skill the author has. I thought it was fitting to set my novel—which pays conscious tribute to the genre—right in the middle of its most productive period. So I suppose you could say that the London I’m writing about is seen through the lens of the golden age.

The pacing is slow, with numerous numbing recaps and restatements. No real surprises, very pedestrian drama, and the weakest of murderers. It’s all wonderfully clever and very satisfying, even if I did only get a third of the way towards solving these mysteries. The police detective and the magician are great characters and I loved hearing them think their theories out loud. At the beginning of the book, the writer gives us a list of characters. At first, I got a bit anxious trying to remember everyone, but don't worry about that, it'll all come together! With time against him, and a host of hangers-on all having something to hide, can Spector uncover the guilty party, or will he and Inspector Flint of Scotland Yard conclude that Ibbs is the culprit after all? Thank you to publisher Mysterious Press for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The case they are tasked with investigating in “Listen to Me” — the bludgeoning of an I.C.U. nurse without a seeming enemy — offers turns and twists that feel earned and organic. Meanwhile, Rizzoli is also preoccupied with constant phone calls from her mother, Angela, who’s convinced that the new couple on her street are up to no good, even though her daughter tells her “there’s nothing criminal about wanting to stay away from the neighborhood sleuth.” It’s going to take all the ingenuity of Joseph Spector, also fortunately attending Paolini’s performance, to sort out how these events are connected, who is responsible and to exonerate young Edmund.

At times it can be a challenge to figure out who is really taking the lead on this case, as Flint and Spector pursue various lines of inquiry. However, while Spector provides occasional interesting disquisitions about the creation of illusions, his potential doesn’t seem to be fully exploited in the novel. Stories about illusionists and real-life magicians usually include some spectacular demonstrations. In the end, inexorable logic wins out.I recently finished the second Spector book, a sequel to Death and the Conjuror called The Murder Wheel. In some ways it’s more challenging because you have fewer words to play with, so it’s not as easy to plant clues and guide the reader up the garden path. But the process itself is actually pretty similar—in my case, I might begin a short story with a single puzzle, image, idea or character, whereas I will begin a novel with a few disparate elements that I gradually weave together. What can we find you doing when you aren’t writing and reading mysteries? Four stars. A good addition to a well written classic-style historical series. For fans of Golden Age classic mysteries, this is a good one. The classic great authors of the period aren't producing any more stories, and it manages to evoke the time period without being derivative or precious. The third volume (The Cabaret Macabre) is due out from Penzler in July 2024. Whilst there is a high body count, there’s no gratuitous gore or unnecessary violence so that the reader can relax into the why and how of the crimes rather than having the what of them forced upon them. Tom Mead knows exactly how to engage as he explores means, motive and considerable morality here. The denouement left me wondering just what I might have done with the information he uncovers so that the story resonated long after I’d finished reading it, adding to the enjoyment. It’s perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and all those other legends from the first half of the twentieth century. It’s a kind of umbrella term which covers all manner of impossible crimes—that is, crimes where there appears to be no way the criminal could actually have committed them.

I enjoyed this story very much and the narrator did an excellent job narrating this book. You do have to really like this kind of old fashioned story telling where, in the end, the explanation for everything is long, detailed, verging on impossible, and requiring numerous contortions and eye squinting to really see how things pull together. But it was fun and I felt like I was right there in the parlor with all the characters while Spector laid out the happenings for us. Such clever fun although too clever for me. This book offered a second refreshing aspect in Edmund Ibbs, a young lawyer and amateur magician. Most of the story is narrated from his perspective which means we get to observe Spector from more than one perspective. What’s more, his presence also means that we don’t get to see Spector as uniquely qualified to solve cases since Ibbs manages to solve at least one of the three cases on his own. In London, 1938, young and idealistic lawyer Edmund Ibbs is trying to find any shred of evidence that his client Carla Dean wasn’t the one who shot her husband dead at the top of a Ferris Wheel. But the deeper he digs, the more complex the case becomes, and Edmund soon finds himself drawn into a nightmarish web of conspiracy and murder. Before long he himself is implicated in not one but two seemingly impossible crimes. This was a pitch perfect pastiche of golden age mysteries, from personae dramatis to the appropriately convoluted solution to the puzzle. Twisting and turning and casting suspicion this way and that, with a bunch of perfectly golden-age-style characters all of whom could theoretically do a murderous turn or two, this challenging murder nugget has a lot to offer. The lead detective and the detecting magician certainly have enough to stay busy. First of all, and what annoyed me from the start, the writing style. This book is mostly dialogue, and barely any description. To me this made the story more difficult to read, and the characters felt a bit flat, because I was simply missing more descriptions of how the moved, and handled the situations. Now the characters just felt very flat, because you basically only got to know them through the conversations that were happening. The author should use more show than tell.

Customer reviews

I've previously Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead, and quite enjoyed the read, There's something really nice about reading a book by someone who takes mysteries so so seriously. And what I can say is - if you enjoyed that story, you will enjoy this one too. That is to say, if the most important element of a mystery is the puzzle - and particularly the physical clues, the timeline, all the paraphernalia associated with putting together the solution - you will love this book.