What a great invention Pignon Scorbion is, he is a contemporary of Hercule Poirot. The story is set in 1910 it is evocative of that time and very well observed. we start in sleepy Haxford and meet such a wonderful array of characters. Pignon teams up with a young ace reported and the local barber to solve the mystery laid before them. If you love Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes (Pignon is a friend of Dr Watson!) you will fall in love with Scorbion, such a fabulous start to what I hope will be a long series of books.

I wanted to like this book as it's an homage to Agatha Christie's Poirot, with a few dashes of Doyle's Sherlock thrown in. The premise is clever - a new Chief Inspector is assigned to a town and he visits his long-time friend and barber to have his haircut, fingers buffed and two-toned shoes properly shined. Because there are several employees, the potential for new cases can come from several sources of information. The first involves a man visiting a local, prosperous linen draper with claims that he is an illegitimate son of a one night liaison. This sets the stage for an impromptu hearing by the parties concerned within the confines of the barbershop. Finishing this section of the book was, unfortunately, as much as I could read and I did not finish the book.
The main character was way too fussy for my taste and I found the supporting male cast to be nothing more than an audience for his self-gratifying pronouncements and mostly indistinguishable from each other. That's probably why the author included a very long cast of characters in the book's preface. I wish the author luck as I still think this is an interesting premise, provided the characters are better developed and the eccentricities of Pignon Scorpion is less of the book's focus.