My book rating: 3 stars.

Dorothy Sayers was one of the first women to be awarded a degree by Oxford University. This sole fact made me pick up this book. The utmost respect I had for a woman, who lived a century ago, drove me to read it till the end.

It is essentially a detective crime novel set in Scotland. This might be a book that could have been very helpful to detectives in the early 20th century. It proposes all possible means by which the murder could have happened. It applies the mathematical principle of permutation and combination to find the guilty individual. And it manages to do it all in a lengthy novel with great attention to detail.

The methods of crime detection today have significantly improved. Hence, the only purpose it serves a present reader would be to enable them to think of myriad ways a murder might have been committed in a painfully tiring manner. For a reader who was seeking an interesting novel to read in bed before going to sleep, reading this novel would be an ordeal. The Scottish dialect and the page-length dialogues make the reader weary. Brevity and being succinct could have made the book more interesting. All over, it wasn’t a bad book since the research that has been put into the novel is laudable, but it definitely doesn’t come under the light-reading-before-bed genre.