Boy was I fooled by the charming snarky first mystery, because the adventures of Horne Fisher only get weirder and just a little bit more and more depressing as you go along. Horne Fisher is cynical, snarky, a genius, and adamantly patriotic. It's no spoiler to say that every mystery ends with Fisher deducing the improbable series of events...and then just lets the darn murderer go for some greater good. And that schtick is both fascinating and really, really frustrating after a while.

I liked "The Vanishing Prince" a lot, which had a clever solution to the mystery of how the heck one guy absolutely wrecked a group of policemen when he was surrounded on all sides. When Chesterton hits his stride, his writing is delightfully witty and unravels in surprising ways. At worst, the setups get so convoluted with red herrings you shrug and say, "What? What was that all about?" The last story, "The Vengeance of the Statue," is --for better or for worse-- a logical end to Horne Fisher's adventures...cranked up to eleven at the last moments.

Now, I listened to Harold Wiederman's audiobook narration. I'm a big fan of audiobooks, but I think this doesn't work for audiobook at all. So much of Chesterton's witty prose and Horne Fisher's clever reveals are "blink and you miss it;" it doesn't help that Wiederman's voices (as comfortingly British as his voice is) sound kinda the same and monotone. Save yourself a lot of confusion and just read it yourself at your own pace.