It's a very old style, but I like his books enough. This one was nice too. The switch for me was not at the end, but rather early in the book, when the murder surprised me. It starts with rich, spoiled Mr Lyne talking to one of his employees. He likes her, but she (Odette Rider) refuses him strongly and Lyne feels deeply offended. He starts hating here and wants revenge. He talks to Mr Tarling, the book's hero, I thought, ad wants to hire him to frame the girl up, telling him she's been robbing his store. Tarling understands the lie and refuses the job. He's a serious detective (who ha worked mostly in China) and feels it his duty to warn the girl of such hatred. Now, at this point I thought Lyne was the bad guy and that Tarling would have to protect Odette from him, but here was the real switch of the book for me: it's Lyne himself that gets killed and Odette is a suspect. Obviously Tarling falls in love with her and he's asked to investigate the murder. Also obvious is that she's innocent.
There are many things involved: Mr Milburgh who also worked in Lyne's store and had been robbing him for a long time: he was Odette's mother's second husband, so the girl didn't want him exposed. Also Mr Stay, a little criminal that Lyne had helped many times, not really out of generosity but because the strange man liked to be talked about, to play the part; Stay loved him deeply, believing him an angel, the best man in the world, and he believed all the lied that Lyne had told him about Odette. Stay was furious and wanted to ruin her. He killed her mother (I guess he thought it was her) so I wasn't all that surprised to find out that he had also killed Lyne by mistake, in an attempt to disfigure her. He loved Lyne so much that he went mad and tried his best to avenge his death against the person he thought responsible for everything: Odette. While Tarling and Inspector ( I think) Whiteside were searching for Milburgh as a thief, an arsonist ( he burned down the place where all the books were supposed to be reviewed by specialists to discover any irregularities) and a murderer, Tarling's Chinese assistant Ling Chu learned of the danger she was in (because Milburgh had told Stay the hospital she was in, after discovering her mother's death) so he went to her to protect her. He arrived to see Stay driving a taxi, without her suspecting a thing. He stayed on top of the taxi until it stopped (Stay phoned Tarling knowing that he would suffer after being told the girl's fate) then he freed Odette and took her place. Once Stay arrived where he wanted to take her (the cemetery, to bury her with Lyne) he got out instead, they thought and Stay was recovered in a hospital where he regained his sanity and confessed all before dying: how he went to her house to punish her, not knowing that Lyne had decided to go to her (for his unholy purposes no doubt). In the dark they didn't recognize each other, so they struggled and he shot his assailant. Later he realized what he had done, that he had killed the man he loved as a God, and tried to take him to a hospital but Lyne died before getting there, so Stay laid him down in the park and put flowers on him (daffodils found in the park).
There were a lot of false tracks too: daffodils in Odette's apartment (of a different kind, though); Ling Chu's sister that was called "The little Narcissus" but foreigners (like Lyne) called her "the little daffodil": Lyne had offended her with inappropriate speeches and insulted her when she refused to go to him and sit on his knees, so she killed herself to regain her honor (because he had "put shame upon her by embracing her before the eyes of men). Ling Chu hated the man and wanted to kill him so he went to the store thinking, wrongly, that he would live there. Instead he was almost discovered by Milburgh who took the gun (Tarling's gun) that Ling Chu had left there in his hurry. Stay had taken that gun when Milburgh had gone to Odette's apartment that same night (because he wanted her to be accused of the theft for which he himself was responsible). That's about it, I think, and obviously it ends with Tarling and Odette together, planning to go back to his beloved China.
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