This is another Christmas novel set behind closed doors. At Easterham Manor, Elizabeth Restorick is found hanged in her room. Suicide or murder, Nigel Strangeways thinks the latter. He and the local police question the family, Elizabeth’s doctor and her fiancé. Each accuses the other with good arguments. Then there is an attempt to poison everyone with cyanide, which makes things even more confusing. A very last development, and everything becomes clear thanks to Strangeways’ perspicacity. A very well constructed mystery that keeps you guessing until the very end.
“Would you say his sanity, in the broadest sense, had been affected by it?”
“Sanity ?” A touch of the old crispness came into her tone. “That is an excessively vague word. Sanity, like some other qualities, lies in the eye – and the prejudices – of the beholder. You yourself, for instance, when you first came down here, thought that I was mentally deranged. Did you not?”
Nigel grinned at her. “Like Justice with her scales,” he replied, “I suspended my judgement.”