The Woman in the Alcove. By Anna Katharine Green. (Chatto
and Windus. 6s.)—Miss Anna Katharine Green is not invariably up to her own standard of sensational mystery, but in The Woman. in the Alcove she contrives to keep the reader's interest on the stretch from the first page to the last. It must be clearly under- stood that the book is not, and does not pretend to be, literature, but within its own limits, which are those of the detective story pure and simple, it is exceedingly ingenious, and the situations are well devised. Unlike many writers of sensational fiction, Miss Anna Katharine Green always takes the trouble " to join her flats,"—in other words, to gather up the minutest end of thread which she has left hanging and tie it up in a satisfactory knot. There is thus no little theory or little clue remembered by the reader and forgotten by the author, and everything is nicely rounded off,—the good people rewarded and the bad thoroughly punished.
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