A Coin of Edward VII

If you enjoy trying to solve the mystery as you read, I recommend you forget about this one. Even the characters don't know who is who. Twists and coincidences are used liberally to keep the plot moving. The dialog has an overly melodramatic soap opera quality throughout. The romantic interests intrude on the story and soon become extremely annoying. The worst Hume book I have read, very disappointing.

Deliciously complicated! Virtually nobody is who they seem to be (sometimes twice over!)! So many twists and turns it makes Christie's The Mousetrap

If a worse mystery from the early twentieth century has been written, I haven't read it. A Coin of Edward VII is replete with unlikely coincidences and overly-melodramatic scenes. It's as if Hume read Nicolas Nickleby and set himself to outdo Dickens tenfold. But Dickens could both write felicitously and invent memorable characters.

Hume's characters babble secrets right and left, and act time after time not only against their own interests but counter to motivation. The plot is not merely excessively involved but extremely unlikely—so much so, in fact, I at one point thought the author intended a clumsy satire.

Example of purple prose: ...with a wild shout both men went down into the furiously bubbling witch-caldron, never to rise again.

Need of editing: ...great changes had taken place in the place

A daughter's inappropriate comment: "I came back in an hour," sobbed Portia, "and found him dead. He looked so handsome as a corpse."

In summary, Coin should be read only by those who have time to waste and the need for laughs. Or should I say, for sneers?

Unlike some of his extraordinary mysteries this story, disappointingly mediocre and unplausibly plotted, lacks in the innate qualities found in Hume's writings. Entanglement of relationships, convolutions in the plot and competition in romance infused in the story, were ineptly sketched. Specially, poor portrayal of the character of Morley and Olga led me to the accurate guessing of the murderer right at the beginning. Although this book can cause a great deal of excitement for the occasional mystery readers, it certainly fails to fit for experienced mystery readers.