Just a whole slew of suspicious people and almost witnesses but there are no answers. We have a large cast of characters, including Patient A, Patient B, Patient C, the doctor's daughter and her rake of a boyfriend, an actress, a producer, several maids, the staff of a hotel, and more.

It's the job of Scotland Yard Inspector George Flint to find the murderer and when confronted with the impossibility of the crime he calls on retired stage magician-turned-part-time sleuth Joseph Spector. What we have here is a closed room mystery but actually there is more than one closed room mystery before the story is over. Psychiatrist Anselm Rees has been murdered and the murderer has disappeared under impossible circumstances. I'd have certainly made a lousy villain back in these olden days. No mere mortal could have thought all of this up. No way I was going to figure this one out! Once we get to the denouement my head was spinning and then doing flips and pretty much just gave up before it was finished.

And when a second murder occurs, this time in an impenetrable elevator, they realize that the crime wave will become even deadlier unless they can catch the culprit soon. When the investigation dovetails into that of an apparently impossible theft, the detectives consider the possibility that the two transgressions are related. As he and the Inspector interview the colorful cast of suspects among the psychiatrist's patients and household, they uncover no shortage of dark secrets-or motives for murder. Spector has a knack for explaining the inexplicable, but even he finds that there is more to this mystery than meets the eye. Who better to make sense of the impossible than one who traffics in illusions?

Stumped by the confounding scene, the Scotland Yard detective on the case calls on retired stage-magician-turned-part-time-sleuth Joseph Spector. There are no clues, no witnesses, and no evidence of the murder weapon. In 1930s London, celebrity psychiatrist Anselm Rees is discovered dead in his locked study, and there seems to be no way that a killer could have escaped unseen. A magician-turned-sleuth in pre-war London solves three impossible crimes.

Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead