Acting Detective Inspector Tess Fox has three major problems with her first murder case, a body whose throat was cut and thrown from the balcony of his flat.

First, the room was locked from the inside. The security cameras recorded nobody entering or leaving the flat and there were no other exits from the apartment.

Second, she knows the victim – and the victim was something that knew something about her that could end her career and possibly her freedom.

Finally, what clues there are point directly to Sarah, Tess’s estranged half-sister, a con-artist and the only person that Tess knows with the ability to pull off such an impossible crime – and the two that follow it…

As you know, I’m always wary of the locked room murder tag on a book. First of it, it might be nothing of the sort, although the blurb makes it clear that the first murder is a genuine locked room. It’s no spoiler to say that the other two – a stabbing in an elevator for the second time in a month for me and a shooting in an hotel room with the door bolted from the inside. So far, so good, but you may remember a part-read unreviewed title that I mentioned recently that had a proper locked room but was resolved by a secret passage. And I can say hand on heart, that is not the case here. I knew that wouldn’t be the case as the author mentions relatively early on Gideon Fell and Henry Merrivale. Of course, most people with an interest in the genre would know those names, but far fewer would mention Edward D Hoch’s Dr Sam Hawthorne. So I was pretty sure I was in safe hands.

There’s also massive points for the two wrong solutions to the first crime – there are two standard ways that I can think of for a death in a sealed flat. One is used in an episode of Death In Paradise, the other in Brooklyn Nine-Nine of all places, but J L Blackhurst not only doesn’t use these, they are dangled as false solutions.

I was not away of J L (Jenny) Blackhurst before this book – she has written eight psychological thrillers and, according to her agent, is one of the leading British crime writers in Germany. I dip my toe into the psychological thriller world on occasion, but it’s not a favourite haunt of mine. This on the other hand, this is far more my cup of tea.

The to-and-fro and one-upmanship between Tess and Sarah, the joint leads is very enjoyable to read and both characters’ stories work well to help develop the overall murder plot. The crimes are nicely done, with solutions that fit the genre nicely. You may well recognise echoes of classic novels in some of them – there’s a whiff of Carr in the first two, but Blackhurst has done something significantly different in each case.

One issue that a series can face is how to keep things going – and it’s pretty clear that this has legs as a series, but there’s only so long, I guess, where a police officer can convincingly work with a confidence trickster. One thing that impressed me was that both characters find their perspectives shifting, rather than one being right and the other learning that fact, and the ending does indicate the direction that the series might well take.

All in all, this is a really good read that genuinely embraces the classic crime genre (and the locked room genre) and brings it into the present day. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out for the next in the series, it’s definitely one to try. To give an idea of how much I liked it – I kept taking breaks between each chapter as I didn’t want it to end. I may have kept putting it down, but only so I could keep enjoying picking it up again!

Three Card Murder is out 31^st August from HQ in ebook and paperback. Many thanks for the review e-copy via NetGalley.