All the telltale signs were there: the detective had been transferred off the case; the detective had been spending a lot of time just as various professionals had instructed him not to, i.e., drinking, smoking, and brooding alone. The police chief had ordered that the case be put on the back burner, for lack of any new developments. Deep winter had turned into an anemic spring, and the detective felt obliged to call on a colleague of his who had been diagnosed with cancer. I had—any reader would have—every reason to believe that sooner or later the bulk of the evidence would begin to tip in the direction of one of the suspects: Would it be the neighbor? The estranged son? The serial killer known to have once operated in the region? A pleasant sense of anticipation washed over me, and I put the book down for a moment, splayed open on the coverlet to keep my place. I listened absentmindedly to the mannered two-note shriek of the crickets outside. Through the crack in the window I could feel the sharp edge of cold night air; I could smell the damp salt breath of the sea, but there I was, warm beneath the blankets, and, for this moment at least, content. If only real life could be like this, I thought, thinking of the book, its trends so clearly recognizable.

After these few moments of contemplation, I picked up the book again. When the character was first introduced, I felt only impatience. I could not understand what a vagrant former soldier had to do with anything, and I dismissed him as another one of the author’s attempts at “atmosphere.” And yet, several pages later, this vagrant had been fingered for the crime. Surely a red herring, I thought. An eleventh-hour distraction. But then a full-scale manhunt for the vagrant was underway. Still, I thought, it couldn’t possibly be. It was unacceptable; you could not introduce the murderer some forty-odd pages from the end. I held out hope until it was clear that there would be no alternative: the vagrant ex-soldier and the murderer were one and the same. He had been in need of money, of course, and suffered from “psychological disturbances” from the war. Passing at random through town, he had had the good fortune to discover, also by chance, that the victim was despite appearances quite a wealthy woman, and so had called later that night to murder her on the floor of her barn.