Bernie Rhodenbarr, bookstore owner and sometime burglar has an invite to value a book collection in the apartment of Mr Onderdonk. All goes swimmingly, with the book collection evaluated and a Mondrian hanging on the wall admired. And then Bernie popped to a downstairs apartment, as planned, as stole some stamps. So business as usual, basically.

But then Bernie’s best friend Caroline’s dog, Archie, is kidnapped, with the ransom being the Mondrian hanging in a local museum. Seeing an opportunity that would be easier than a museum robbery, Bernie breaks back into Onderdonk’s apartment, only to find the Mondrian gone. After a not-so-brief encounter with a woman who had also broken in, Bernie leaves… only to soon receive a visit from his cop friend Ray. It seems Onderdonk was in the closet, tied up and with his head bashed in. And the time of death places it at the time of Bernie’s first visit…

There’s a story that Lawrence Block has told, according to Wikipedia at least, about being so horrified by the film adaptation of The Burglar In The Closet starring, as the gentleman burglar, um, Whoopi Goldberg, that he made the subsequent books unfilmable. And that is certainly the case here.

There are quite a lot of visual things, mostly people pretending to be different people, that means the finale would just not work. Oh, it works fine on paper, but it’s rather clever what Block does here.

And, as with all the books in the series, the reader – this one, at least – has a lot of fun watching Bernie being put into a near-impossible-to-resolve situation and then watching him almost dance his way out of it.

It’s quite a complex narrative and if you can follow the game of musical Mondrians at the end of the tale, then you’re a smarter reader than me. But it’s told with such panache, with such a light, fun tone.

The Bernie Rhodenbarr books are such fun – you can get the first five collected as an ebook for a few pounds and it’s an absolute treat.