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About the author: Hugh Austin is a pseudonym of Hugh Austin Evans (1903-1964). His series characters are Peter Quint and William Sultan.
Major characters:
- Mr. Valentine Merritt, business partner
- Mrs. Eunice Merritt, his wife, victim #1
- Mr. Andrew Arnold, business partner, victim #2
- Mrs. Carrie Arnold, his wife
- Drewes Patton, business partner, victim #3
- Miss Jean Patton, his daughter
- Mr. Norman D. Lang, business partner
- Cleve Huskins, gardener
- Lt. Peter Quint, detective
- Sgt. John Hendricks, detective
Locale: Hudson, New York
Synopsis: Valentine Merritt, Andrew Arnold, Drewes Patton, and Norman Lang are business partners in a New York brokerage firm. They gather for a weekend get-together at Arnold's estate, enjoying tennis and swimming in the pool (actually a small man-made pond).
Things go well until Merritt's wife, Eunice Merritt, is found dead in the summerhouse gazebo. She has been stabbed, and the tip of her nose cut off as well; and a faucet left running at the scene. Lt. Peter Quint, Sgt. John Hendricks, and other authorities descend on the scene. Quint has just found out that Eunice is a bit of a playgirl with the other partners, when Arnold himself is found dead in his bath, stabbed and nose cut in the same manner, with the bath water still running. It becomes a puzzle of sorting out motives and opportunities, when Drewes Patton is found dead after taking a shower in the same manner. A possible motive for Arnold's and Patton's murder is the insurance policies taken on partners, with the remaining partners as beneficiaries.
Review: This is a fast paced novel, with all events happening within a four-hour time frame; even the chapters are divided/titled by minutes. It is a puzzle of sorting out the movements of the cast to the minute; and this got a bit tiring for the reader. I took the author's word for it and didn't try to follow the movements, to do so would require a map and moving the figures around on it.
My advice for the reader is not to focus on the movements, but rather use a process of elimination by charting out who had alibis for which murder. The solution follows a similar format as And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1945).
There are gritty details - unusual for books of this era. This is the first golden-age novel I can recall that mentioned flies on a dead body - certainly factual but generally beyond mentioning at the time.
Cleve Huskins is enjoyable as the gardener who takes everyone's words literally. He would be literally aghast at the liberal - and incorrect - use of the word today.
