Devil’s Neck, a manor house and former field hospital during the Great War, stands at on an outcrop, with the only connecting road one that disappears at high tide. The perfect site, with its memories and its phantoms, for a séance. A party arrives with various motives – contacting loved ones, documenting the miracles of the psychic – and in the shape of Joseph Spector, finding the truth.

Before one of the party is found dead inside a locked room, apart from a fellow guest and a sinister puppet, Inspector Flint, Spector’s longtime ally, is working on another locked room death in London. But as he comes close to the truth of that death, it seems clear that all roads lead to Devil’s Neck…

Hmmm… This is the fourth Joseph Spector novel (and there’s a collection of short stories too) and was the first of my holiday reads. It was a book that I was looking forward to a lot – I really enjoyed Death And The Conjuror, The Murder Wheel and Cabaret Macabre, so I went into this one with high expectations.

For the most part, those expectations were easily met. I really enjoyed the growing sense of menace at Devil’s Neck and the parallel plots of Spector’s and Flint’s investigations worked really well. I was quite impressed with Flint being able to employ Spector’s methods due to their many cases together and as the stories dovetailed, the tension ratcheted up nicely. He’s certainly no Inspector Masters…

However it was at the end where I felt this came up a little short. The explanations as to what ultimately has happened seemed overly complicated to me. The locked room is a technical one, not my favourite type at all, and while the “who” of the household was clever, the various reversals as to who was who made my head spin. The undoing of something that had earlier impressed me also disappointed. Having said that, it is all fairly clued and Mead isn’t shy of pointing out via footnotes exactly what the reader has missed.

All in all, not my favourite of the series. It may have had the misfortune of being read before (but crucially not reviewed before) the Carter Dickson classic The Judas Window which really is the gold standard. It’s definitely worth a look, still easily in the top tier of Golden Age homages, but I do recommend taking the odd note as you read it.

The House At Devil’s Neck is out this Thursday (in the UK) in hardback and ebook. Many thanks for the e-review copy.