★★★☆☆ | Spy-Detective | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
The third installment of the Nero Wolfe mystery series. A muscle man who’s quite a thinker himself is the protagonist in these books. Wolfe is the enigma that we collectively marvel at for his brilliance and idiosyncrasies. Reading this book after just finishing Storycraft by Jack Hart forced me to look at the joinery work and finishing of the plot and how it moved along. One of the downsides of studying the craft of writing is that some of the enthralling magic of the story fades away as you better understand what the author is doing.
In this one, I thought Stout introduced too many non-essential characters that in the end weren’t needed. I kept having to flip back in the Kindle to remember who someone was and then being disappointed at the end that this confusion wasn’t warranted for the story’s resolution.
We still don’t know much of the interior workings or desires of Archie or Wolfe. It’s a first person story, but even as the narrator, Archie is aloof and sarcastic. I wonder if he loosens up over the many books of the series?
No guy who knows he’s right because he’s too conceited to be wrong can be expected to go into conference about it.