Title: A weak outing
Product review: I can only hope that this is a particularly poor example of Carr's work. From the lumbering setup--two notches below a bad episode of "Diagnosis Murder"--to the stretch of a solution, "The Problem of the Wire Cage" tries hard but fails to impress, having all of the characteristics of a modern mystery potboiler, back before the cliches were cliches. Carr's dialog is snappy, and his writing can be nicely descriptive, but he seems intent on using genre conventions (e.g., the old "one of you here is the murderer" line), and the story never livens up as a result. I wanted to like this book, but the flashes of the author's charm were few and far between.
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