Truss transplants the quirky, clever wit that drove her nonfiction best-seller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves​, to fiction in this adaptation of a radio show starring Brighton, England, police officers Steine, Brunswick, and Twitten and featuring assorted oddballs on both sides of the law. Newbie Twitten, who’s thought to be too smart for his own good, hopes his career is on the upswing when he happens to be seated beside a malodorous, mean theater critic just as the man is killed. Inspector Steine believes the crime is related to a massacre in Brighton years before, and the ensuing investigation takes delightful twists and turns that reveal sordid secrets and long-ago crimes underlying the resort town’s jolly character. It is, at times, difficult to keep track of the numerous characters involved in this post-WWII drama, but a close reading brings rewards. Truss’ language, unsurprisingly, sparkles, and her portrayal of class and its exasperating effect on even the British underworld is memorable. Readers of Agatha Christie are a natural audience for this study in peculiarity.

In the 1950s, Brighton, England, was bucolic and lovely—if you disregard the hooligans, Teddy Boys and other criminal mischief- makers lurking about ... This farcical tale is packed with interwoven plotlines, clues strewn about like confetti and a comically oblivious chief inspector. It reads like a stage comedy, and in fact Truss has written four seasons’ worth of Inspector Steine dramas for BBC Radio. There are no dark and stormy nights here, just gorgeous seaside views marred by occasional corpses. The ’60s are coming, but for now, women are still largely ignored; this turns out to be its own kind of liberation, since who would suspect them? Sharp and witty, A Shot in the Dark is a good time.

For the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves to call a crime novel A Shot in the Dark does seem a bit of a hostage to fortune. The moment a panda shows up, it’s going to be bish bash bosh, case closed. Disappointingly — or prudently — these pages don’t contain a panda; but they do contain a theatre critic with terrible BO, a murderously angry Punch-and-Judy man, a charlady with an interesting hinterland, a phrenologist with an interesting hinterland, a bar-bending music-hall strongwoman with an interesting hinterland, a teenage dollybird with no hinterland whatsoever, and a number of more or less incompetent police officers ... This is amiable enough stuff, and in the closing pages rather ingeniously plotted. But the reader ought to be warned that this is the sort of unceasingly jocular novel where Italian mothers say things like 'Those Casino Boys done this to my Frankie!'...A decent indicator of whether you will mostly chuckle or mostly sigh at A Shot in the Dark will be the extent to which you find saveloys intrinsically funny. A third category of reader, mind you, will simply be wondering whether the comma after 'missing' should have been positioned after 'and'; but those people are pedants and we don’t want to pander to them.

Adapted from the author’s British radio series, A Shot in the Dark is a terribly chatty novel proceeding in such a leisurely fashion and with such an influx of seemingly unrelated information that the reader at first may not recognize it as a droll and witty satire of the English cozy novel ... A Shot in the Dark is a comedy of criminal errors with a Monty Pythonesque flavor, written with the author’s tongue firmly implanted in cheek. One hopes that author Lynn Truss will present us with more of Constable Twitten’s adventures, if only in a set of four as was the radio series.

Ms. Truss has written a... comic mystery: one where criminal conspiracies lurk beneath life’s cozy surface and society’s most admired authority figures are clueless ... A Shot in the Dark couples suspense with dark hilarity in the manner of the 1955 British black comedy film The Ladykillers, thus delivering (just in time) the funniest crime novel of 2018.

Six years after the Middle Street Massacre wiped out all 45 members of the Giovedi crime family and its rival gang, Fat Victor’s Casino Boys, DI Geoffrey Steine, who’d arrived from the City of London Police just in time to hear the news that most of the town’s leading criminals had killed each other, is still convinced that there’s no crime in Brighton and that he’s the reason why. The situation changes with a bang when an unknown member of the audience interrupts the opening night of Jack Braithwaite’s play A Shilling in the Meter to keep exacting critic A.S. Crystal, a 'Robespierre with BO,' from filing his scathing notice by shooting him where he sits ... As in Cat out of Hell, Truss piles up ingenious plot twists, preposterous coincidences, snarky asides, and characters out of P.G. Wodehouse, this time replacing her murderous felines with a setup out of the genre’s golden age. Readers who can suspend their disbelief are in for quite a workout.

British author Truss makes her crime fiction debut with this hilarious series launch ... Truss successfully combines wry humor with a fair-play mystery.