ARCHAEOLOGIST-turned novelist Elly Griffiths is digging up the postwar past for her latest whodunit.
Having found success with her contemporary series of Ruth Galloway novels, she's set her new book in austerity-era 1950s Brighton.
It's a world of miserable boarding houses, rundown theatres and sterile new estates struggling to recover from World War Two with characters to match.
The plot revolves around the survivors of a secretive army unit - the magic men - brought back together by a murder.
The victim is in three parts, as if the trick that gives the novel its title had gone wrong, and the magic men - one now a policeman, the rest plying their trade in a series of fading variety shows - have to delve into their past to find the murderer.
It zips along at an impressive speed with a rapidly increasing body count, which makes for an entertaining read, but at the expense of the potentially more interesting back story which stays too far back for the book's own good.
7/10
Review by Rob Dex
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