The Garden Hotel in Kensington housed an odd collection of people, including journalist Charles Venables and Lady Viola Merritt, the woman he proposed to many years previous. It’s pretty clear that something is going on at the hotel – the owners, the Budges, don’t particularly want a journalist staying and then proceed to be daft enough to be overheard saying something about they need to make sure that the cover of the hotel being a normal hotel is maintained. Master criminals, they aren’t…

… especially when Mrs Budge falls ill and is bed-ridden. Her nurse, Mrs Sanctuary, is attacked and Mrs Budge disappears. It doesn’t take too long for her to be found, however – well, her head is found pretty quickly.

Charles finds himself working alongside Inspector Bray to find the truth about the hotel, but when so many secrets are being kept, can they find the truth that will lead to the killer?

My last holiday read, and this is definitely going to be a brief one as I really enjoyed it, and, as said before, don’t have an awful lot to say about it due to it not having any real problems. It’s a good solid murder mystery, with interesting characters, a complex plot and a satisfying solution.

I’ve read Sprigg before – Fatality In Fleet Street, Death Of An Airman and the somewhat bonkers Six Queer Things – and always enjoyed him without exactly gripped by the book. I think this, his first mystery novel [Kingdom of Heaven, as listed on his Wikipedia page, is not a mystery but a religious allegory] and it’s well worth your time. Even better than that, it’s readily available with at least two companies in the UK publishing it – Moonstone Press and Black Heath –  as he’s out of copyright in the UK, having died in the Spanish Civil War. So you really have no excuse not to give it a go…