The Murder Wheel

In this follow-up to Death and the Conjuror, former stage magician Joseph Spector is back to help Scotland Yard with yet another hopelessly baffling case.

In London, 1938, young and idealistic lawyer Edmund Ibbs is trying to find any shred of evidence that his client Carla Dean wasn’t the one who shot her husband dead at the top of a Ferris Wheel. But the deeper he digs, the more complex the case becomes, and Edmund soon finds himself drawn into a nightmarish web of conspiracy and murder. Before long he himself is implicated in not one but two seemingly impossible crimes.

First, a corpse appears out of thin air during a performance by famed illusionist “Professor Paolini” in front of a packed auditorium at the Pomegranate Theatre. Then a second victim is shot dead in a locked dressing room along one of the theatre’s winding backstage corridors. Edmund is in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, and attracts the suspicion of Scotland Yard inspector George Flint. Luckily, conjuror-turned-detective Joseph Spector is on the scene. Only Spector’s uniquely logical perspective can pierce the veil of deceit in a world of illusion and misdirection, where seeing is not always believing.

Tom Mead continues to pay homage to the locked-room mysteries of the Golden Age in this second Joseph Spector novel.

Mead plays scrupulously fair with his readers … Lovers of John Dickson Carr’s puzzle mysteries will hope Mead has many more Spector tales up his sleeve.”
―Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW

A triple-barreled puzzle…. Even readers who live to match wits with canny authors and detectives are likely to be outwitted by this one.
―Kirkus

The Murder Wheel harks back to an earlier type of mystery … Making things even more fun here is the combination of two vintage templates: the locked-room puzzle and the theater mystery. Add a charismatic protagonist, and you have a recipe for pure nostalgic pleasure.”
―Wall Street Journal

Tom Mead is already a master of the art of misdirection.”
―Peter Lovesey

A delicious locked room feast of impossibilities set in the golden age of theatre and murder mysteries. I love the Mephistophelean Joseph Spector!”
―Ovidia Yu, author of the History Tree Mysteries

In his captivating second novel Tom Mead establishes himself as the current master of the locked-room mystery, and The Murder Wheel doesn’t give us merely one example of this honored tradition to solve, but three of them … A Winner!”
―Aaron Elkins, author of the Gideon Oliver series

A clever writer with a mastery of setting, plotting, and the world of the illusionist, Tom Mead takes the reader on a delightful ride. Ibbs is a deliberate man—the perfect narrator for a story of murder committed very deliberately. I was pulled deep into the puzzle and held there to the very end. Kudos, Mr. Mead. Mystery readers will love this dazzling, page-turning tale.”
―Carolyn Haines, USA Today bestselling author of the Sarah Booth Delaney mystery series

Tom Mead writes with the sophisticated and knowing voice of another era, with a skilled sleight of hand, and with deep knowledge of psychology, magic, and human nature. THE MURDER WHEEL is an engaging, perplexing, and irresistible riff on locked room mysteries—you’ve never seen a series of crimes as delightfully complex, or as brilliantly crafted.”
―Hank Phillippi Ryan, USA Today bestselling author

Tom Mead has quickly become one of my must-read authors, writing some of the most ingenious and entertaining locked-room mysteries being published today.”
―Anthony Award- and Agatha Award-winning author Gigi Pandian

The Murder Wheel was a delight from enigmatic start to clever finish. Tom Mead’s expert, house-of-mirrors plot joyfully confounds the reader page after page. It is a real treat of perplexities and conundrums for mystery lovers everywhere.
―Earlene Fowler, Agatha Award-winning author of the Benni Harper mysteries

[A] triply clever salute to the golden-age whodunit.”
―Shelf Awareness

Tom Mead is a UK-based author specializing in crime fiction. His stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Litro Online, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Lighthouse, Mystery Scene and Mystery Weekly (among others). Several of his pieces have also been anthologized, most recently “Heatwave” in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 (ed. Lee Child).

See more titles by Tom Mead