After spending the last Knives Out entry on a billionaire's private Greek island, master sleuth Benoit Blanc's latest mystery Wake Up Dead Man takes him to a remote parish in upstate New York to solve the murder of a priest (Josh Brolin). It's a classic locked door mystery, with Brolin's monsignor stabbed mid-mass in a closet a few feet from his pulpit.
The locked-room mystery-otherwise known as the "impossible crime" mystery-is not to be confused with the closed-circle mystery often associated with the queen of Golden Age detective fiction, Agatha Christie. The classic "country house during a blizzard" setting with an array of suspects, each of whom might have committed the murder, is a closed-circle setup, as is Christie's Orient Express train, and the steamer in Death on the Nile. In a locked-room mystery, it seems that no one could have done it and escaped undetected.
