The Poisoned Chocolates Case

⚖The case for it

Six members of an amateur criminology club take a night each to present a complete solution to the same case, and the others take it apart before the next one stands up. Readers describe being genuinely convinced by each in turn, then watching it demolished, which they call “a roller-coaster ride as cases were built and then demolished.” The six are sharply distinct, “the blustering ancient lawyer, the razor witted female author,” “an intriguing and mismatched bunch.” Sheringham’s voice supplies “vim, snark, weightless insight, and effortless thrust-and-parry.” The real subject is “the tricks that detective novelists play.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

What is fresh for two detectives wears thin by the fourth: “first two were interesting, the middle three were a real slog” through the same setup-and-demolition each time. The six are functions rather than people, and “all the characters are grandiloquent in an almost identical way,” to the point readers take notes to keep them apart. The solutions lean on psychological guesswork rather than reasoning, each a “seemingly-convincing argument, filled with holes and bias.” Fair-play objectors doubt “if any reader would or could have worked it out.” And the club-room comedy strikes some as “a contrived attempt to make something comical that just isn’t.”

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings