Review: The Seventh Shot

The Seventh Shot by Harry Coverdale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that works reasonably well for most of its length and then fails to stick the landing.

What I mean is that, like a few classic mysteries I've read, it shows you the detective doing all the right things to solve the crime, and then the actual solution isn't revealed by the detective - though in this case, his investigation does indirectly cause the dénouement. Exact details in spoiler tags: (view spoiler)[The criminal, spooked by how close the detective is getting, decoys him with the old "telegram in a false name" trick into stupidly going off unarmed with no backup into an obvious trap, and nearly manages to kill him. Fortunately, he doesn't quite get totally fooled, and is able to capture, and therefore identify, the murderer as a result. Also, the victim wasn't the intended victim, which invalidates all of the speculation about motive - there was plenty, because nearly everyone hated him - and added to my sense of letdown, particularly since, again, the criminal had to confess this, rather than the detective figuring it out. (hide spoiler)]

The romance subplot is also barely worthy of the name, and the parties to it spend hardly any time together.

The detective is on the scene of the murder mainly because the play that's at the heart of the plot had a scene involving fingerprints, and they called him in to show them proper procedure, and then he got interested and hung around. But when the murder occurs, he picks up the weapon without taking any precautions to preserve fingerprints, and nobody seems to think to fingerprint the weapon; unless the murderer wore gloves, which they might or might not have, this could have solved the crime almost immediately and there would have been no story, but given that the reason the detective was there at all was because of the fingerprinting process, it seems odd that there's not even any discussion of its application to the actual crime, even just to say "we tried it, but found nothing."

What the book does do well is show us behind the scenes of a Broadway play, and set up a complex web of relationships (many of which are not in evidence until teased out by the detective) that tie multiple people together and provide the appearance of motive. That part, and the investigation, are good enough that it does make it into my annual Best of the Year list, but because of its other failings, it comes in at the lowest tier.

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