I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a fondness for the traditional kind of mystery with a long list of characters before the story begins and/or with a final scene in it with the detective in the case confronting the suspects and one by one points out why they might have done it, and how. One of those isolated manor houses, English, most likely, in which one of the people trapped somehow inside must have been the killer, but who?

   There aren’t many covers that do something similar, but H. R. F. Keating’s The Murder of the Maharajah was one, with small portraits of 12 of the characters shown on the front in some detail.

   And here’s another, with 12 more possible suspects (or additional victims) depicted on the cover. No artist is credited, which is too bad, as this is one that certainly caught my eye.

DELL. Paperback reprint, September 1990. Hardcover edition: Scribner’s, 1989. UK edition: Collins, 1989.

      From the back cover:

Des Capper, landlord of Saracen’s Head, a splendid Elizabethan inn, had been called a bore, a snoop, and other things not fit to print. Currently he was provoking his newest arrivals, the performers of the Ketterick Arts Festival — as rowdy a group as ever trod the boards. Des thought knowledge was power and was busily digging up secrets to “get” someone good. The brilliant conductor with the Casanova complex … the gorgeous Russian soprano with a taste for bit players … the theatrical couple with a marriage so open it had a revolving door … all of them — and scads of others — soon had the urge to kill Des. Finally someone did. But why would be the best-kept secret of all.

“HARD TO RESIST … MY, BUT IT’S FUN TO READ ROBERT BARNARD.”   — The New York Times Book Review

“IRREVERENTLY HUMOROUS, INVENTIVE BARNARD CAPTIVATES READERS WITH HIS LATEST EFFORT … [YOU] WILL EXULT IN THE KICKER THAT ENDS THIS SEDUCTIVE STORY.”   — Publishers Weekly