An entertaining summer read locked room mystery. The setting 1936 London, a psychologist is found dead in his study. A mysterious stranger visited late the night before, the housekeeper heard the Dr. on the phone shortly after the visitor left. All entrances were locked, it rained outside last night and there are no footprints near the back of the house. All of the doctor's patients and those who live in his house, including his daughter and the housekeeper have alibis. Who killed the doctor?

For help the police (Scotland Yard) seek out a former magician and part time sleuth Joseph Spector. Debut author and likely returning character in Spector and his magical sleuthing ways. (Pun intended)

Death and the Conjuror
Tom Mead
7/12/22

I wasn't crazy about this book. In fact it took some effort to get through it. I liked the premise, but something got lost in the storytelling. However, I do think this will have a an audience. It just wasn't me.

Loved this locked room mystery! Mead creates a character in magician Joseph Spector that makes me want to read his next case. The secondary characters were delightful, the mystery clever, and the clues out in the open. I will happily recommend this mystery to my customers.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Penzler Publishers Mysterious Press for an advanced copy of this locked room thriller.

Back in the day mysteries seemed a lot more fun and easier to get involved in. Bodies would appear in impossible places, rooms, bell towers, dungeons, the Oval Office, with no entry or egress possible. Someone would make a call and a amateur sleuth would appear, and the police would just let that person poke around, follows cops around, ask questions, maybe even hold a dinner party for a witty yet intelligent denouement. Today's mysteries are not as interesting no tricks, no mirrors, no identical twins with shared alibis, just a lot of serial killers, and people shooting each other over parking spaces. Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead is a throwback to the mysteries of yore with a cleaver amateur versus a criminal who always seems a step ahead, even as the bodies pile up.

A psychiatrist fresh from Austria has arrived in England with his daughter, is found murdered in his study, locked from the inside with no sign of trespass. At the same time a priceless painting is stolen from a mansion filled with people, without a clue being left. What is the connection between these two crimes? What is the secret of the psychiatrist's patients nicknamed Patients A, B, C? Who is the masked man that follows these patients? Only Joseph Spector, retired magician and amateur sleuth can deduce the answer and the connections of these dastardly crimes.

Great fun. A good old locked door mystery with an answer that harkens back to the classics, with a fair play solution to both crimes and plenty of clues. In fact the clues even get flagged so the reader and go back and go, oh yeah. Now I get it. The writing has that sort of distant writing that seemed so prevalent back then, an almost haughty air, that really helps keep the atmosphere of the story. The detective is clever, teaches some magic tricks just for fun, and has a aura of the mysterious around him, which also helps. There are plenty or red herrings, and a lot of Easter eggs in reference to classic mystery stories and writers. Just a lot of fun to read.

Definitely recommended for fans of Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, or new modern locked room writers like Yukito Ayatsusi or Ragnar Jonasson. This is the first that I have read of Tom Mead, at least in novel form, and I look forward to more books by him.

Love this book, full of twist and turns and fabulous characters. A psychologist is murdered and the chase is on to find who, and how it was done. There is a daughter, and magician, the police and people coming and going at the time of the crime. There are files that need to be be puzzled over and a mystery in the past.
All in all a book which I found both entertaining and very hard to put down. Will look for more from this author.

The Seemingly Impossible…
1930’s London and celebrity psychiatrist Anselm Rees is discovered dead in a locked study. A seemingly impossible crime with no clues whatsoever and no witnesses to be found. Scotland Yard are baffled. It’s time to call on Joseph Spector. He has an ingrained knack for the explanation of the seemingly impossible. With a wonderfully vivid collection of eclectic characters and a beautifully written narrative this is a first class homage to the Golden Age of Crime. This is no pastiche, this a well written mystery with a truly baffling puzzle at its’ heart. For mystery lovers everywhere. Aficionados of the Golden Age will surely not be disappointed.

Tom Mead is an author who, for anyone reading this blog, likely needs no introduction. A many-time publisher of successful impossible crime short fiction published heavily in crime fiction anthologies and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, likely best known for his hard-boiled story “Heatwave”, Tom hadn’t produced his first novel-length outing until Death and the Conjuror, published by Otto Penzler and Mysterious Press.

Anselm Rees, world-renowned Italian psychiatrist, has led a stable life in England, keeping a modest practice of only three patients since his immigration with his daughter Lidia. A torrent of unexpected visitors culminates in the throat-slashing of Rees in his study, which had been locked and sealed from the inside so that entrance and escape is wholly impossible. When one of the suspects is also accused of (under impossible circumstances) stealing a rare painting from a house party, Detective Inspector Flint is forced to consult magician and master of illusions Joseph Spector to help elucidate the problem. Together, Flint and Spector interview the late Rees’s family, employees, and patients in order to locate whodunit.

Horizontally, laterally, frontwards, and backwards, Tom Mead’s breakout novel is the impossible crime fan’s impossible crime, having everything a reader of locked-room mysteries will love from a locked-room mystery novel, and safely having nothing he may not. In fact, Death and the Conjuror is ultimately a bisection between your average John Dickson Carr impossible crime and Clayton Rawson’s Death from a Top Hat in all of the best (and not-so-best) ways.

Tom Mead’s writing style is one of the first things I wanted to compliment when writing this post. Many Golden Age greats have written characters with distinct identities and personalities who nonetheless get lost in the same voice of high-class sophistication that permeates much of the prose (even those authors well-known as stylists as well as plotters). Oftentimes even authors who weren’t explicitly trying to be literary felt like they were trying to flout their intellectualism in place of style. Fortunately, Tom manages to blend period-appropriate language with a voice obviously developed with modern sensibilities, creating a novel that, though no less convincing as a 19xx mystery story, is majorly more readable and palpable than the average mystery tale of the period, and boasts clearly defined characters and voices.

As a mystery novel holistically, Death and the Conjuror is fantastically realized. Like any Golden Age tale of ratiocination, Death and the Conjuror brings you from clue to clue, building up a picture of murder over time that only compounds into something more complex, no matter how much the detective wishes it would get better. There are many interesting set-pieces, clever clues, and neat logic throughout, and the ways circumstance unites the characters in the plot-at-large are always interesting and fluid. Apparently there are many reasons for the troubled to visit their psychiatrist in the middle of the night!

In spite of the focus on a psychiatrist and his patients, the book also doesn’t delve too much into overreaching psychology as a clue. It dips its toe in places, but it’s always interesting and never anything it expects the reader to guess based on idealized archetypes of demographic psychology. I will say, however, that despite the novel’s theming around psychiatry, this particular element of the story felt wasted in establishing the killer’s motive, which was ultimately pretty basic in light of all the circumstance surrounding it. Moreover, the way the detective divined the motive is fair, as it demands a few assumptions and guesses that we as readers will or can naturally make, but isn’t as credible from a perspective within the series. (ROT13 for anyone who has read the story: Vg qrznaqf gur nffhzcgvba gung “Gur Fanxr Zna” vf n fvtavsvpnag cneg bs gur fgbel, naq gur nffhzcgvba gung gur fpbcr bs Gur Fanxr Zna’f vaibyirzrag jvgu gur cybg vf erfgevpgrq gb gur cevapvcyr punenpgref bs gur abiry. Gur guvatf pbaarpgvat gur zheqre naq Gur Fanxr Zna fgbel ner cerggl grahbhf, yvxr gur cerggl trarevp angher bs gur jbhaq (n fyvg guebng) naq bar punenpgre orvat va nal cneg bs pbagvaragny Rhebcr ng n pregnva gvzr, naq sryg zber yvxr gur qrgrpgvir zrgn-grkghnyyl ernfbavat sebz sberfunqbjvat engure guna pyhrf.)

As a locked-room mystery, however, I was much less enamored with Death and the Conjuror than I’d hoped going in. There are three impossible crimes in this story, the two mentioned above as well as a murder in an elevator that never opened or moved during the course of the crime.

The principle murder of Dr. Anselm Rees reminds me of all of the things I don’t really like in those locked-room murders in the Rawson/Sladek/Talbot class, where I felt like the effect of an impossibility was valued over the effect of its explanation — like a magic trick. It was a series of tricks which, as part of a mystery novel, culminated in the illusion of a more grand-seeming murder plot than what we were really in store for, all as the cover for what I consider a pretty bland explanation (which relies on an old dodge I think many seasoned readers will probably clue into when the body is found (nsgre gurl, gurl arire gbhpu gur xrl…). While I thought that the individual revelations that led to the explanation were interesting and engaging, and the denouement perfectly satisfying, the whole thing was missing that something that many of my favorite impossible crimes have, that central deception around which everything else revolves in one way or another, that one detail that finally fits perfectly into place after nagging at you for 200 pages — the oomph, or the chutzpah, or whatever it is you want to call it.

The two secondary impossible crimes are fairly minor affairs. The theft of the painting is resolved partway through the story, and the explanation might be one of the first few ideas you have. The question of “where is the painting now?” is much more interesting, and handled very well. The murder in the elevator is a pretty flimsily-established impossibility, relying on the testimony of a single witness, and the explanation for why he’s trustworthy isn’t exactly convincing. It has a neat piece of sleight-of-hand in the set-up, but the actual commission of the murder relies on what I guarantee will be the first thought to occur to most people (when I talk to my uninitiated friends about murders in elevators, this is the first explanation they always jump to before anything else). It’s also diluted by being incredibly mechanical.

There is, near the end, a dissertation on the nature of locked-room mysteries. I’m not quite sure how to qualify it, but it is a very good “locked-room lecture” that some may think flirts a bit dangerously with spoilers…

That all said, my verdict on Death and the Conjuror is that it is a fantastic crime novel… which has a locked-room mystery, and not, unfortunately, a fantastic locked-room mystery. Outside of the locked-room mystery and the killer’s motive, nearly everything here works, and there are plenty of clever, devious revelations throughout that do a fantastic job of juggling suspicions between its core players. Many unique moving puzzle-pieces fill out the plot of this novel, from the psychological afflictions of the victims’ patients, to the identity of the masked man who visited him, to the history of the Rees family, and the inner workings of a theater group… As a crime novel, you can do little better to fill out as intriguing a tale of murder and detection as this.

What a delightful book to read! This was a classic whodunit mystery, and kept me guessing throughout.

I loved the setting and the feel of the book, you really felt immersed in the time era of the book. The author was clever to set it in the 20s as I think the whodunit mystery really works back then. The characters were wonderfully fleshed out, with little Easter eggs left throughout to help you guess the solution. What makes this book even better is that in a world of mystery books, a good whodunit mystery is a breath of fresh air.

Overall, this was a 5 star read for me, and a delightful book to read if you love a mystery book!

it's 1930s England and the death of a world renowned psychiatrist, has rocked Scotland yard to its core. The Dr. was found in his office, alone and locked in from the inside.
How did the perpetrator get out? Can Scotland yard figure it out before it is too late?
With no clues, no witnesses, and not one trace of a murder weapon the stumped detective on the case calls on retired stage magician and now sleuth Joseph Spector to help unravel the mystery and bring the person responsible to justice.

I found the premise brilliant! The mystery of the locked room and no seeming motive was so delicious I couldn't put the book down. The twists and turns and all the second guessing lasted right up until the big reveal at the end. Expertly done. I do have some issues with the book. I felt the introduction to Spector lacking. It left me wondering if there was a book before that I had missed where he was properly introduced. That could have been done so much better. More back story and understanding as to why the detective decided to approach him in the first place for help. I felt like a big part of the whole story was missing and that is still how I felt when it ended.

I loved all the characters. Touching on the different types of psychomachia was clever and made the characters more tangible. Della really was a conundrum and I would have actually liked to have known more about her for my own curiosity. The only character I didn't much care for was the daughter Lidia. I think she was deliberately made unlikeable which shows how much skill the author has.

If you love a good whodunnit that will leave you guessing until the very end then this crime debut will have you scratching your head and thirsting for me.

Solid 4 stars maybe even 4,5. Thank you netgalley and Penzler Publishers, Mysterious Press for my ARC in exchange for an honest review

If you can overlook that then this book was beyond magnificent. I crushed it in one sitting. My hope is that this become a series.

A very good homage to the Golden Age and locked-room mysteries. Who killed Dr Rees and how was it done? The writer has cleverely plotted this book to keep you guessing right up till the last moment and the denouement explains everything perfectly though I have to admit to being as bit confused about the technicalities of how some of the trickery was done. This, however, didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book as all the different plots and sub-plots were nicely woven together at the end to make this a very satisfying read and one I would happily recommend to others to read. I look forward to reading more books by this author.

London in the 1930s, celebrity psychiatrist Anselm Rees is discovered dead in his locked study – no witnesses, no murder weapon, no clues. Detective Flint is assigned to the case and calls on Joseph Spector, a retired stage magician, now part time investigator to help him. Dr. Rees and his daughter Lidia moved from Vienna to London a few months prior. He had 3 patients, all celebrities known as Patient A, B and C. As the detective and the magician work through the cast of suspects and witnesses, they uncover numerous motives, secrets and even, art theft. Suspicion abounds, on Anselm Rees 3 patients, his daughter, her fiancé. Then there’s another murder, this time in a sealed elevator (another conundrum) and Flint and Spector get closer to solving the crimes.

This will appeal to fans of Agatha Christie and locked room mysteries. It’s quite akin to Elly Griffiths ‘The Brighton Mysteries’ series (book 1 is The Zig Zag Girl) which I have really enjoyed too. A well paced clever atmospheric whodunit with well-drawn characters, Flint and Spector’s partnership feels genuine and I’d definitely like to read more about them in the future.

With thanks to Netgalley and W. W. Norton & Company (Penzler Publishers, Mysterious Press) for the ARC. Death and the Conjuror is published in July 2022.

This was a fantastic read!!! Death and the Conjuror is the perfect whodunit mystery. A psychiatrist is murdered in a room locked from the inside with his housekeeper not far away. A mysterious man visits the house that night, but the doctor is heard on the phone later. Then, a client tries to visit the doctor and he is found murdered. Who. Did. It?!
I love a story like this that lets you discover the mystery along with the detective, and in this case, his colleague who is a magician. At one point, the writer even breaks the fourth wall and stops to ask the reader if they've figured the mystery out! I loved that! And of course I hadn't figured anything out!
The police detective and the magician are great characters and I loved hearing them think their theories out loud. At the beginning of the book, the writer gives us a list of characters. At first, I got a bit anxious trying to remember everyone, but don't worry about that, it'll all come together!
Thank you NetGalley and WW Norton & Company for this fantastic read that comes out July 12, 2022.

An engrossing tale of murder and magicians…. A lovely book with a great cast of characters. Beautifully written and I got really invested in the story. I would highly recommend reading this one.

Thanks to Net Galley and W. W. Norton & Company for this ARC. I was pleasantly surprised by this book, the first few pages did not catch my attention but I persevered and i'm glad i did. A great novel with a good twist. Looking forward to reading more from this author.

Well, I did not expect this but it was amazing. Do not miss it if you like interesting plots and characters and are looking for a great story.

This one had me at conjuror. The crime-solving magician sounds like an awesome character for a story. Not just any story either, a murder mystery, specifically an impossible by design locked variety of one.
This was a pitch perfect pastiche of golden age mysteries, from personae dramatis to the appropriately convoluted solution to the puzzle. Twisting and turning and casting suspicion this way and that, with a bunch of perfectly golden-age-style characters all of whom could theoretically do a murderous turn or two, this challenging murder nugget has a lot to offer. The lead detective and the detecting magician certainly have enough to stay busy.
I really enjoyed this read. It had all the charm of a bygone era without any of its dated nonsense and a charming meta-wink-wink-nudge-nudge quality to it too daring the readers to play along. This cunning nostalgia tinted mystery is sure to delight armchair detectives. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

London,1936. There had been "an increase in 'impossible' crimes-typically high-society affairs, where men in locked rooms were killed under impractical circumstances...murder as a puzzle." so stated Scotland Yard Inspector George Flint.

Dr. Anselm Rees, having left Vienna five months prior, resided in an upscale suburb in London with his daughter, Lidia. As a noted psychiatrist, he was in the process of treating three patients, referred to as Patients A, B and C. All sessions were conducted in his study. Three late night panicked telephone calls ensued. Oh no! The good doctor had been found murdered! Both the study door and French windows were locked from the inside, no weapon nor fingerprints found. According to housekeeper Olive, "I can tell you that-not five minutes ago the doctor was alive and well in this room because I heard him talking on the telephone."

Inspector Flint requested the expertise of Joseph Spector, professional trickster. "Though his gait and dress sense were those of a very old man...like all conjurors he played up to the confusion." "An impossible crime in a locked room-Spector, as magician, might be able to tell how the trick was done." But wait...an impossible art theft...a second baffling murder. Are these deceptive, puzzling crimes connected?

Who are the suspects? Dr. Lidia Rees, daughter of Dr. Anselm Rees, seemed to be matter of fact about her father's demise. Her playboy boyfriend had many secrets. What of Patients A, B, and C? Why did the Rees family emigrate to London from Vienna? So many unanswered questions.

"Death and the Conjuror" by Tom Mead is a Golden Age locked room mystery of the finest caliber. Do you think you can easily solve the murder mystery? Reader, guess again! I hope author Mead considers writing a series with the pairing of Inspector George Flint and retired magician Joseph Spector as sleuths on a quest to solve mind boggling, seemingly impossible crimes. Highly recommended.

Thank you Penzler Publications/ Mysterious Press and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

What a fun throwback to the golden age of mysteries. Set in 1930's England, this is a well-done locked room mystery. A renowned psychiatrist has been murdered and it's up to Inspector Flint of Scotland Yard and a retired magician, Spector, to figure out the how-done-it and who-done-it. There are plenty of suspects among the psychiatrist's relatives and patients, plenty of clues and red-herrings. I didn't figure it out but was really just along for the ride. I hope this becomes a series. More Flint and Spector!

Best things about this book:
- classic locked-room mystery providing all the information the reader needs to solve it. (Note: I did not figure it out, but you might!)
- the amateur detective is a magician!
- fun, atmostpheric setting
Frustrating things about this book:
- this is not a historical mystery. It is supposedly set in the past (I forgot what the time period is supposed to be, and you'll see why if you read this yourself), but I think that's only a device to ensure that the author doesn't have to account for modern police procedure or use technology.
- the characters' behavior only makes sense if you squint and also accept that they all have strange psychological issues.
- the characters' relationships also make no sense. Ex: the detective somehow lets a magician more or less steer the entire case. Ex: the detective and magician talk openly, in public, and even in front of witnesses/suspects, about all the details of the case, including deeply personal information they've uncovered. This somehow never has any bad repercussions.
- The characters all speak in the same style, which is overly ornate and full of odd usage errors, as though a thesaurus was carelessly employed. For example, a character is "bemused" by a magic trick, and the magician [gives] a soft chuckle, delighting in the young man's rancour." There is nothing to suggest that the character has abruptly shifted from bemusement to bitterness. At one point, the case is described as "diaphanous." This odd usage didn't appear in every paragraph, but it was frequent enough to be distracting.
I wanted to love this book, because I enjoy historical mysteries. However, part of what I like about them is the way those books bring the past to life. That wasn't what this novel was trying to do.

From the shadowy figure to the locked room murder, I was convinced this was a Golden Age mystery reprint. Tom Mead uses the tropes and language of those books but leaves out the casual racism and misogyny.

Very well done. I need more Spector novels!

4.8/5