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304 pages, Hardcover
First published August 4, 2020
Remember that I’ve rejected the view of detective stories as logical puzzles, where the clues define a unique solution and the process of deriving it is almost mathematical. It’s not, and they never do. That’s all just sleight of hand.... [T]he central purpose of a murder mystery is to give its readers a handful of suspects and the promise that in about a hundred pages one or more of them will be revealed as the murderers. That’s the beauty of the genre.... It presents the reader with a small, finite number of options, and then at the end it just circles back and commits to one of them. It’s really a miracle that the human brain could ever be surprised by such a solution, when you think about it.