Three Card Murder stars Tess Fox, a newly-appointed Detective Inspector looking to cut her teeth on a murder case. The murder is that of Shaun Mitchell, who crashed to the ground outside of his apartment building. He’s partly been bound with rope and his throat slit. But when Tess and her team enter his filthy apartment, they quickly realize they have a problem: The CCTV camera outside shows no one entering his apartment for a day before his death, and the door was boarded up from the inside. Tess isn’t looking forward to trying to chase down an invisible, intangible man, and she has enemies on the force who would love to use this as an excuse to one-up her. But she has bigger problems.
Tess is the daughter of Frank Jacobs, the biggest conman in Brighton, head of an organization of swindlers. Tess didn’t know her father growing up and tracked him down fifteen years ago. She was accepted with open arms but abruptly joined the police force six months later. The reason is only partly down to moral qualms. Tess’s half-sister, Sarah, made a foolish effort to con three men out of their ill-gotten gains and it went badly wrong. Tess ended up killing one of them to bail her and Sarah out. Shaun Mitchell was one of those men, and Tess has good reason to think that someone is trying to tie her half-sister, or even Tess herself, to his murder. So she, with great reluctance, asks Sarah for her help.
Shaun Mitchell isn’t the only locked room mystery our cop and con sisters will have to contend with though. Another man is found stabbed to death in a lift, even though no one was seen to approach him. Another victim is shot to death in a hotel room chained shut and that CCTV shows no one entering. There’s a nice sense of forward momentum to the book. The other members of the book club griped a bit about the writing, but I didn’t mind it too much. There are, perhaps, some chapters that are mostly filler, such as one where Sarah impersonates a psychic, but for the most part I found this to be a solid read on a writing level. The only thing I didn’t like was the book constantly reminding us that Tess killed a man. Yes, it’s important because concealing that and her connection to the Jacobs’ motivates some of Tess’s actions, but I didn’t need reminding of it.
The book falls apart for me at the ending. Take the locked rooms: They aren’t bad. You could argue that the first one makes use of a hackneyed plot device, but I’d say that the way Blackhurst uses it here is silly but plausible. The third locked room is pretty great, my favorite of the book. But there’s almost no cluing. This is especially egregious for the second death. We’re told that X was acting a certain way, but if you flip back, you’ll see that that detail is never mentioned. And it could have been a good clue! And, frankly, the police should have been able to solve it, they would have noticed that fact at some point. It would have been fine if that was the point, like, "they're going to figure this out but I just want to confuse them for a while,) but no, they just don’t notice it. The same goes for the culprit. They’re straight out of a thriller, no chance at figuring out who they are and what they want except through genre savvy and wild guessing. The worst bit is the ending. I can buy Sarah making the choice that she does at the end, I can’t believe that Tess would go through with it.
So, in the end, I was disappointed with Three Card Murder. It’s not an awful book, but it doesn’t live up to the promise of three impossible crimes with a backdrop of con artistry. I can’t in good conscience say you should check it out. Not Recommended.
Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Crossexaminingcrime, Beneath the Stains of Time, Fang's Mystery Blog.
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