Consider, for a moment, the title to this particular mystery: “Might As Well Be Dead.” This is a familiar, if not common, phrase. It is usually spoken with a jocularity that implies that the speaker doesn’t take his or her thought completely seriously, for, in reality, it is an awful idea, that events could descend upon an individual with such harshness that their life now resembles the coldness that we assume death to be. So, the phrase, when uttered with a singular sadness and despair, takes on a frightening weight. And that is precisely what spirits Nero Wolfe into this tale.

Before it is over, there will be a few bodies littering the literary horizon, and many things will not be as they first appear. Guilt and innocence will change places a few times. Like the proverbial jigsaw puzzle, facts, events, suppositions and evidence will all coalesce in a clever, provocative way. A Nero Wolfe novel is something akin to watching a chess match, but one where the rooks and pawns are real characters, and the stakes are considerably higher.

It is all handled with wit and verve. In this era where it seems sometimes that body-count is more important than style and where a cruel bloodthirst seems to dominate contemporary crime fiction (alas, I am probably guilty of adding a few titles to the list that fit this description), the reemergence of Nero Wolfe, with his carefully nurtured and coddled plants and dangerous, ever-expanding waistline, is a welcome respite from the harshness that seems to have overtaken the genre-regardless of whether one wants to call it a “mystery” or a novel of “psychological suspense.”

–John Katzenbach