Novel Plot Warning: dog death.
WHK promised intrigue and murder with a twist, and delivered confusion and two murders, two deaths, and unnecessary conflagration. In an effort to pay homage to all the great (and I do mean ALL) mystery writers of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, McDorman loses his own voice and story. Moments that the narrator spoke directly to the reader mocked the arm-chair sleuth for thinking ahead or attempting to solve the puzzle (with phrases amounting to "surely, you think, this is how it would play out"), instead of just letting the plot narrate and instruct. There are interesting sections on the history of the murder mystery as a play or novel, and how various authors tackled scenes, but everything was so overladen with a pretentiousness, and the sections were so randomly interspersed through the novel, that instead of truly adding to the narrative it served more as a distraction.
McDormans journalistic background is felt in those sections and I would rather have read an entire nonfiction book about the history of the mystery novel. If the plot had been more developed and only told as a third-person, I would rather have read that. The denouement was done in an interesting format but resulted in a "whomp-whomp" of "I read the whole thing... for this?"