What a horrible cover design!
I’ve read this before, but it’s been decades. I remember nothing about this except that I think it’s one of the better Barnard books?
But once I started reading it, I realised that it has the best twist of any Barnard books. Barnard always has a twist of some kind, but they’re frequently twists in bits you don’t expect to get twisted, if that makes any sense. That is, instead of a normal mystery twist, it’ll be something totally different — and this book carries that off in the most extreme manner: First we get the solution to the mystery in the normal way (pretty good mystery), and then in the very, very final sentence of the book we get a twist so momentous that you can’t help laugh out loud.
Unfortunately, it’s so memorable that I remembered it several decades afterwards… on the other hand, the mystery itself was OK, so whatevs.
(The book also does display Barnard’s tendency to bloviate about Society And All Its Ills, but it’s not too bad in that dept. I guess you could shave off about 50 pages here, and the book would have been better, but it’s fine.)
A Scandal in Belgravia (1991) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.79 on Goodreads)