One of the most enjoyable resurgences in mystery fiction has been the return of the locked room mystery, a crime scene where the victim is found in a secure space with no visible means of entrance or egress. Crippen & Landru has published some of the best locked rooms mysteries with collections by John Dickson Carr and Edward Hoch. While locked rooms have been around since Edgar Allan Poe, we are enjoying the new generation of talented mystery authors. One of these clever new authors is Tom Mead, who pens the Joseph Spector series. In three novels and numerous short stories, Mead has shown that Golden Age mysteries are not gone-or forgotten. Spector appears in all but two of the stories in this collection. (One of non-Spector works is “The Wager,” the additional chapbook included with the clothbound signed and numbered edition.) Three of the remaining stories are new- never been published until now.
