Hurled back in time, a London police detective struggles to solve a nineteenth-century murder mystery in Golden Age master John Dickson Carr's thrilling mystery novel. A woman is killed in a well-lit corridor, dying before the eyes of three witnesses who, impossibly, detect no foul play. For more than a century, this baffling murder lies cold in the files of Scotland Yard until it is discovered by Detective-Superintendent John Cheviot, who yearns to apply modern scientific policing to the grisly old case. He is about to get his chance. Taking a cab to Scotland Yard, Cheviot steps out in front of Old Scotland Yard and sees a beautiful woman beckoning him. Suddenly it is 1829 and Cheviot is a member of the newly organized London police force. He might now have an opportunity to solve the most puzzling murder in the Yard's history, but in a time before fingerprints and ballistic analysis, he will find police work to be far more baffling and brutal than he is used to.
"Just the sort of rare imaginings that Mr. Carr, the Grand Wizard, brings off so well."
New York Herald Tribune
"As history, as romance, as mystery, as detection the story is splendid, with an exact and detailed picture of the Yard's early days, an alluring love story, copious action, and a solution wholly surprising."
