1901, and the village of Cleverley is in the grip of terror. A dread monster seems to be stalking the village – two women were found dead with bite marks on their throats, only to be seen subsequently wandering the woods at night. When the coffins of the women were opened, they were found with wooden stakes driven through their hearts, and the body of one of the women, despite being dead for over a year, seems not to have decayed at all.

When the man who found the first victim is murdered inside a sealed room, with the killer vanishing in a puff of smoke, the village is certain who the vampire among them is. After all, he has no reflection when viewed in a mirror. But when Owen Burns arrives, drawn to the case by similarities with another locked room murder in London, he has suspicions that things are not exactly what they seem…

“Owen treated us to a lecture on locked rooms; I will spare the reader the tedious details.”

And we return to the modern-day master of the locked room, Paul Halter, who it seems from the above line is getting tired of the comparisons to Carr as well. His books, adeptly translated by John Pugmire, have always been a mixed bag for me, with some excellent, most full of clever ideas but tending to be overfull of such things, and only a couple that I didn’t particularly enjoy. This one… well, I certainly enjoyed it. A lot.

One thing about this one, especially as I felt there was a similarity with a certain John Dickson Carr title (not the vampire one) I really wasn’t sure where it was going. Was it going to be someone pretending to be a vampire for some reason? Was it a real vampire but a mystery as to who it was? Or was it going to have a real-world solution, only for a character to be left alone, only to turn into a bat or something. Now I’m not going to say which one it is, but I can confirm that this is a proper mystery. And yes, he’s thrown everything and the kitchen sink into this one again.

However, it didn’t feel overstuffed that some of his other titles, because all of the impossibilities have a common link, being centred around the “is person X a vampire?”, and the complex plot explaining what exactly is going on works really well. Those among you who like realistic plots might question the lengths some characters go to in the story, when a billiard ball in a sock might have worked more easily, although if you are in that camp, why do you read classic or classic-style mysteries? The big picture is clever and ties everything together when, until the final few chapters, it seems as if nothing would make sense of everything.

It’s not perfect. There are three (I think) technical impossibilities here all of which are far too complicated for my liking – and this is from someone who understood Jim Noy’s locked toilet door in the excellent The Red Death Murders – and I’m not sure how well-known Bram Stoker’s novel was in 1901. It had sold well, four years after publication, but given its importance to the plot…

My plan for this month was to find great books to read, after an indifferent March. So far, if you ignore the fact that this is only my second read of the month so far, it’s going well…

Paul Halter Reviews:

Dr Alan Twist:

• The Fourth Door
• Death Invites You
• The Madman’s Room
• The Tiger’s Head
• The Seventh Hypothesis
• The Demon Of Dartmoor
• The Picture From The Past
• The Vampire Tree
• The Man Who Loved Clouds
• Penelope’s Web

Owen Burns:

• The Lord Of Misrule
• The Seven Wonders Of Crime
• The Phantom Passage
• The Mask Of The Vampire
• The Gold Watch
• The White Lady

Non-Series:

• The Crimson Fog
• The Invisible Circle