The Siamese Twin Mystery

A very different mystery for Ellery Queen this time. In the equivalent of the British “Country House”-style murder, Ellery and his dad are trapped in a house with a bunch of rather odd characters on top of a mountain while a forest fire blazes around the base. Obviously someone, Dr Xavier, the head of the house, is murdered but for the first time for Ellery Queen there is a finite set of suspects – so can Dannay and Lee (aka Ellery Queen the author) pull off a piece of literary legerdemain without resorting to the tried and tested “person that you’ve overlooked” trick that has been almost a constant in the first six books.