SIMON TROY [THURMAN WARRINER] – Cease Upon the Midnight. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1965. Previously published in the UK: Gollancz, hardcover, 1964.

   The coroner’s jury, sitting on the death of Dr. Bewlay from an overdose of sleeping tablets, leaves open whether it was accidental or intentional. Inspector Smith, too, has not made a decision. Did Bewlay’s fiancee, or his ne’er-do-well actor brother Raymond, or both give him an overdose, and how could it have been done? Certainly Bewlay was not a man likely to kill himself.

   Acting on the invitation of Robert Neil, who runs an advanced girls’ school on the island of Grenezy, where both the fiancee and Raymond have gone, though separately, Smith travels to the island, discovers much about the participants, and nearly doesn’t make it back.

   While the murderer is known early and may be surmised even earlier, the interest here is in Smith — whose superintendent can’t decide whether he is Machiavellian, naive, or dim — and his investigation, which is first class. The bright but still dumb heroine — “There was no risk,” she contends, “you came just in time” — has a tendency to fall in and out of love with considerable dispatch, and the villain is just a bit too villainous.

   These flaws, if flaws they are, weren’t noticed during the reading, only in the reflection afterwards.