Martin Clarke has decided to buy a haunted house – it has a history of strange happenings, not least the evening when the octogenarian butler decided to swing on the chandelier until it came free and crushed him to death.

When the guests arrive for the housewarming, it doesn’t take very long before strange things begin to happen. A ghostly hand grabs a guest by the ankle from out of nowhere. But most sinisterly of all, a gun lifts itself free from its display on a wall and shoots a man in the head. And nobody was anywhere near…

A re-read as I reviewed this almost ten years ago. I wanted to read some more Carr – it’s one of the challenges that I set myself this year – but most of the ones that I’ve not reviewed are not my favourites, so I decided to take the easy way out and read one that I couldn’t remember much about.

It does get some short-shrift, not least because the impossibility is rather silly. Yes, it’s clued, and I can see how the gun could be fired. The big, big question is how it could be fired accurately. And yes, I know there is the rationale of the victim being, shall we say, a sitting duck, but even so. Surely the wall behind him should be peppered with practice shots?

Putting that to one side, it’s perfectly fine, but is a lesser work to those surrounding it. The Problem Of The Wire Cage, its predecessor, has its flaws, but it’s told very well, with the focus on the lead characters trying to cover up their apparent complicity in the crime, and the next book, The Case Of The Constant Suicides, is, well, near-perfect.

There is a really nice idea with the ending, as it’s pretty obvious who the guilty party is, but the mechanics of who did what are really quite clever. And Carr’s use of one of his favourite, and more annoying, tricks is used well here, although the “clue” that reveals it is, shall we say, more than a little obscure.

Oh, and the odd title is a play on the Grimm fairy tale, “The Boy Who Could Not Shudder” which is apparently a story about a child who isn’t scared of anything but shudders when someone throws a bucket of cold water over him. What an exciting story.

This is a perfectly decent read, just less than top-notch Carr. It’s available in the UK as a pretty cheap ebook as well, should you be interested.