Three green bottles

There are many showier if few better practitioners of the modern-traditional mystery story and this one, one of the author's best, deals with the murders of three young girls, all an unlucky 13, while a doctor with a record of personal instability and compulsive sexual needs falls, or was assisted, to his death. Mr. Devine's ending which is really the beginning could possibly once again be faulted but you would have to look hard to find more plausible and differentiated characters that live before they die. Kirkus review