To Wake the Dead
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Mystery novelist Christopher Kent accepts a friend’s outlandish bet and sets out to travel from Johannesburg to London with nothing but the cash in his wallet and the clothes on his back. He arrives with twenty-four hours to spare, his wallet and his stomach both empty. While cadging a breakfast at a luxurious hotel, he is implicated in the brutal murder of a hotel guest. Fleeing the scene of the crime, Kent takes refuge with Dr. Gideon Fell, the portly genius who specializes in murders too baffling for Scotland Yard. For Kent, getting to London was the easy part. The trick will be avoiding the hangman.
To Wake the Dead is the 9th book in the Dr. Gideon Fell Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
John Dickson Carr
John Dickson Carr was born in 1906 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a lawyer. While at school and college, he wrote ghost, detective and adventure stories. After studying law, he headed to Paris in 1928. Once there, he lost any desire to study law and soon turned to writing crime fiction full-time. His first novel, It Walks by Night, was published in 1930. Two years later, he moved to England with his English wife; thereafter he became a prolific author and became a master of the locked-room mystery. He also wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, radio plays, dozens of short stories, and magazine reviews. He died in 1977 in South Carolina.
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Titles in the series (7)
In Spite of Thunder Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Man Who Could Not Shudder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dr. Gideon Fell Mysteries Volume One: The Blind Barber, Death-Watch, and To Wake the Dead Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTo Wake the Dead Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death-Watch Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Blind Barber Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To Wake the Dead Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for To Wake the Dead
40 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not his best. I found it difficult to engage with the characters. I also have the audiobook. It will be interesting to see whether this draws me in more
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The cover illustrates a bizarre scene from the novel in which a man in full traditional British police uniform with helmet is using a poker to attack a man in a graveyard. N y favorite Fell partly because the victims seem to be decent people.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This a book about unexpected pleasures. Carr's 'locked room' mysteries are a kind of self-reflexive chess game. This one has a particularly satisfying reveal towards the end. Up to that point, everything has been deliciously wrong-footed, especially the reader. The hotel set of the twenties is well drawn and there are plenty of magic tricks throughout.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Almost up to the standard of Carr's best books, this one opens with a typically intriguing situation. The central character has worked his way across the world for a bet and finds himself temporarily penniless and hungry in London. A chance find allows him to have breakfast at someone else's expense in a large hotel, but he then finds that the room he has claimed to occupy has a dead body in it. The action moves later to a small Sussex village, where Dr. Fell as usual traps the killer. Recommended to lovers of Golden age mysteries.