An affectionate acquaintance with Joyce's Dubliners adds considerably to the pleasures of this profoundly clever literary mystery, the better to appreciate its careful Joycean parallels in plot and character.

None of this should seriously interfere with the reader's complete immersion into an exceptionally clever mystery and into the love, lust and chicanery that create its world of pain.

It's a clever mystery, adroitly laid out.

Oscar Wilde's short story "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" is a clever mystery, written to indict the fate industry - the palmists, spiritualists and telepathists, frauds every one of the them, with whom late-19th-century aristocrats seemed so enthralled.

Though one severely wounds a postman, and so sets off the plot of this clever mystery directed by Sidney Gilliat, for the most part the flying bombs - called doodlebugs by the stoic locals - are treated as a running gag.

Josh Lacey of The Guardian stated the book is a "charming, clever and enormously enjoyable little mystery which asks all sorts of questions, but answers very few of them; I'm already impatient to read the rest of the series."

But Bayard's shockingly clever and devoutly unsentimental new mystery reads like a lost classic.

He told his girlfriends that he could write a really clever mystery if only he had the time.

Discovering the author's identity makes for a clever mystery as Ginsberg adroitly amps up the suspense.

"An affectionate acquaintance with Joyce's Dubliners adds considerably to the pleasures of this profoundly clever literary mystery."