Reviews: The Queen in Winter

(If you suspect that Chapter 5 has just turned on me, you are not wrong.)

The Queen in Winter is reviewed at length by Dionne Galace.

And reviewed, also in a fair amount of detail, at Roundtable Reviews.

Also reviewed at Romance Reader at Heart.

UBC #8: The Four Johns

UBC #8
Queen, Ellery. [Jack Vance.] The Four Johns. 1964. Signet Double Mysteries: The Four Johns and Blow Hot, Blow Cold. New York: Signet-New American Library, 1978.

I am both fond of Ellery Queen (in propria persona as Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) and fascinated by the phenomenon of the EQ ghost-writers, who include Theodore Sturgeon, Avram Davidson, and Jack Vance.

The Four Johns is one of Jack Vance's. It's fine up until he has to explain the murder, at which point everything goes galley-west. It's always easier to create mystery than to solve it--which I say not as a cheap sneer, but as the truth. I don't think I could do better.