Immediately after being thoroughly exasperated by The Penrose Mystery (1936) by R. Austin Freeman, I picked up The Claws of the Cougar (1957) by Norman Berrow with low expectations — sorry, Norman — and breezed through it in a couple of hours of sheer delight. If authors are supposed to do their weakest work at the end of their career, no-one told Norman Berrow: this and preceding title The Lady’s in Danger (1955) are very strong, and he didn’t publish another new novel before his death in 1986 (Ghost House (1979) doesn’t count, since it was an edited version of Ghost House (1940) and we’ll find out what all that was about in due course).