title: The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes
author: David Renwick
description: <b>Penzler Pick, <a href="/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/137750/${0}">February 2001</a>:</b> The very thing that first hooked me on mysteries long ago is the element most on display in this fat and satisfying volume: amazement. Not whodunit or why, but <i>how</i>. And that really means <i>wow</i>, as in, "Wow, I can't believe what I just read!" Such cases were originally the province of Edgar Allan Poe's Inspector Dupin, whose unraveling of such sensational "impossible" crimes as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" gave the reading public of an earlier era its appetite for gasp-inducing solutions. Just a few decades later the mystery genre had progressed to a more rational approach, with which Arthur Conan Doyle equipped Sherlock Holmes, though the crimes demanding our greatest sleuth's attention were highly fanciful more often than not. Snakes in airshafts menacing gentlewomen! Clubs restricted to redheaded fellows! Wow!
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  THE MOAI ISLAND PUZZLE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  KOTŌ PAZURU
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  Paul Halter books from Locked Room International:
  
  
  The Lord of Misrule (2010)
  
  
  The Fourth Door (2011)
  
  
  The Seven Wonders of Crime (2011)
  
  
  The Demon of Dartmoor (2012)
  
  
  The Seventh Hypothesis (2012)
  
  
  The Tiger’s Head (2013)
  
  
  The Crimson Fog (2013)
  
  
  (Publisher’s Weekly Top Mystery 2013 List)
  
  
  The Night of the Wolf (2013)*
  
  
  The Invisible Circle (2014)
  
  
  The Picture from the Past (2014)
  
  
  The Phantom Passage (2015)
  
  
  Death Invites You (2016)
  
  
  
  
  
  *Original short story collection published by Wildside Press (2006)
  
  
  
  
  
  Other impossible crime novels from Locked Room International:
  
  
  The Riddle of Monte Verita (Jean-Paul Torok) 2012
  
  
  The Killing Needle (Henry Cauvin) 2014
  
  
  The Derek Smith Omnibus (Derek Smith) 2014
  
  
  (Washington Post Top Fiction Books 2014)
  
  
  The House That Kills (Noel Vindry) 2015
  
  
  The Decagon House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji) 2015
  
  
  (Publisher