dara_m 's review for:

Death at the President's Lodging by Michael Innes

1.0

mysterious

Diverse cast of characters: No

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I got fed up with the constant lampshading and started rolling my eyes around the 50% mark. "Wow, what a plot contrivance that would be if I wrote it in one of my books!" "Well, if this were a book, your thought processes would make perfect sense." Please shut up. Either fully commit to being over-the-top and goofy with no lampshading or actually make a more realistic story, thereby removing the need to lampshade hang. 

And I was sorely let down by the ending, despite my expectations already being low, when they went,

"well, of course it was the mentally ill person, everyone knows people who aren't ~normal~ are the ones who're more likely to commit crimes!" Man had the most tenuous motive out of all of them and pretty minimal character development but don't worry about it because he's ~insane~ or whatever. This is after they finally allowed the detective to figure out the plot by having a key witness who saw basically everything come forward at the last minute with no good justification for not saying something sooner.

Go read Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, that one's way better.