Death at the Bar
Ratings3
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings3
Average rating3.3
A cosy game of darts in a cosy English pub is going well until one of the players dies on the spot. Chief Inspector Alleyn knows it wasn't the dart that killed him, but the prussic acid someone added to the cut.
Featured Series
25 primary books26 released booksRoderick Alleyn is a 35-book series with 25 primary works first released in 1934 with contributions by Ngaio Marsh, James Saxom, and 5 others.
Reviews with the most likes.
This was a serviceable mystery with a fairly interesting (although confusing) mechanism, and an okay solution - nothing super mind-blowing.
Luke Watchman falls down dead after being nicked on the hand by an errant dart, when another pub patron attempts to do a dart trick on him. The dart is later found to be laced with cyanide, but the packet of darts was newly opened and all the people in the private bar couldn't have done the poisoning without the others seeing them at it.
I missed Marsh's engaging storytelling, where the story plods along without much drag. There isn't much bloat or filler, which I've come to appreciate after having explored some other golden age mysteries which seem to go on forever. It doesn't hurt that we're back to a good ol' straightforward murder mystery.
But overall, this was just OK. The cast of characters were not very likeable in general. It did play some games with me in terms of who the culprit might be in the end (is it a bluff? A double bluff? A triple bluff?). The solution was satisfying enough, although not as mind-blowingly twisty as I might've hoped.
