The Duke of York's Steps by Henry WadeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A twisty piece of classic detective fiction.
An elderly banker with a known health condition (an aneurism that could easily burst under stress) dies of exactly this cause after being jostled by someone hurrying down the steps of the title. It's treated as something between an accident and natural causes, until his daughter raises suspicions. Why has the person who jostled him not come forward, even in response to her advertisements, to apologize for any part he might have had in the death?
With this slim suspicion to go on, Inspector Poole begins to investigate. The dead man's son looks a likely suspect: he has motive (he badly needed money, and his father was about to cut him out of his will for his latest escapade with an unsuitable young woman), and his alibi is thin and implausible. But before the mystery is wrapped up, Poole will spread his net wide and encounter more than one shocking twist.
I did guess about halfway through both the motive for the murder and who was behind it, though there were a couple more twists I didn't see coming at all. One of them I wasn't a big fan of; serious spoiler in the tags. (view spoiler)
It's cleverly done, though, and I would definitely read another by the same author, though at the moment this is the only one on Project Gutenberg.
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