With technical assistance from Dr. H. Jellett, Ngaio March produced this good Puzzle story for readers to test their wits with--setting it in a "nursing home," where people rightfully expect to be helped by the staff, not murdered by any of them.
The title, THE NURSING HOME MURDER, probably will confuse most U.S. readers, who associate the term "nursing home" with the places that elderly people are put so that they can have professional nursing care 24/7. In the U.K., however, the term has a very different meaning--here in Marsh's detective novel, it refers to a small private hospital where surgery is performed.
When a high-ranking British government official dies shortly after an emergency operation, Marsh's series detective, Roderick Alleyn (pronounced "Allen"), receives suspicious information from the man's widow and agrees that the matter ought to be investigated fully. It soon is clear that the dead man was given a fatal overdose of medicine by somebody, either right before or during the surgery. And so, chapter by chapter, Inspector Alleyn interviews everyone associated with the case--and three main suspects quickly come to light.
Are you clever when it comes to spotting clues and weighing evidence? Are you good at assessing people's personalities? Perhaps you can solve this case before Inspector Alleyn does.
For the most part, Marsh plays fair with readers, and you have a good chance of getting at least 85% of the solution right. A few things ARE withheld, and even Alleyn admits that luck played a part in his getting the evidence he needed. Since this can be seen as a flaw in the story, perhaps it is why I've rated this book 4 stars instead of 5.
Otherwise, on the plus side, Marsh provides us with an interesting cast of well-developed characters--AND she occasionally has some of them say amusing things.
If you happen to buy the hardback copy published by Aeonian Press in 1977, be warned that it has many typos of all sorts. Perhaps you can consider that as an extra cryptographic challenge to your brain: adding in correct punctuation (or removing excess punctuation), decoding or replacing words that are incorrect in several ways, adding missing words (or deleting excess ones), etc. etc. etc.
