My first Ngaio Marsh-Roderick Alleyn novel. I loved the setting on the Devon Coast, which Marsh could be quite poetic about, but she was also quite clear-eyed about the goings-on there: the romantic intrigue, the village gossip, the long-suffering pub landlord and his dim-witted son. Yet the characters were well-drawn and did not seem like types. The investigation of the murder at the center of the novel could be quite tedious, however; when Alleyn reviews the whereabouts of every pub patron when the lights went out for the umpteenth time, the reader begins to wonder if there wasn’t more economical way to solve crime. Still, I enjoyed the relationship between Alleyn and Inspector Fox, and the references to the British Communist Party, which was indeed worrisome to some Tories in the late 1930s and early 1940s.