I got really annoyed by the knee-jerk Reds-under-the-bed part of The Hand of Mary Constable though I loved the technical breakdown of how the scam was brought off (and the insight that because the mark -- John Constable? -- thought of himself as super-rational and the brightest man in any given room, he was more vulnerable to being scammed because his reasoning went "If I can't see how this could be a scam, then it can't be a scam" rather than "If I can't see how this could be a scam, there's some information I'm missing." A nice take on "When you've eliminated the impossible...")

It occurs to me that I've just gone through yet another super-annoying discussion of Peter's Room (the AF group on FB, fwiw) and that one of the things I find annoying about those discussions is that the blurb on the back is trying to sell PR as one of the sort of novels in question here, and it just isn't, but the dissonance between people who believe the blurb and people who don't always sets the tone for the discussion.