Danny De Mare leads safari trips. He comes to Superintendent Vachell's office to persuade him to join the current safari in order to investigate the theft of Lady Baradale's jewels. Vachell agrees to go and travels back to the group with De Mare. The day after their arrival, Lady Baradale is dead of a gunshot wound to the head. So now he has a theft case and a murder case on his hands. Re-read in 2013. I got a sense of the group and of the daily events of the safari - the kind where the point is to kill an animals to have the skin as a trophy. The surroundings are described well so I had a sense of the area. The solution is well written and the edition I read had footnotes at the bottom indicating the pages where the clue was laid out.
Reading this book was so painful. Huxley apparently only wrote 3 mysteries featuring Inspector Vachell and now I've read each of them. I have enjoyed reading these so much more than almost any of the better known British mystery writers of the decades between WWI and WWII.It's sad that there aren't more. But perhaps that's the key. She was only willing to publish as much as her imagination would support and chose not to publish additional works that weren't up to the same standard.Her stories are much more like those of Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie than more modern writers such as Ruth Rendell but I like them better.