The Dead Mountaineer's Inn: One More Last Rite for the Detective Genre

When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet, he intends to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude. But the chalet's other vacationers -- a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, and a large handful of others -- are a nuisance, and so is the avalanche that soon cuts the inn off from civilization. And then there's the dead body, which may not even be human...In this genre-bending novel, the Strugatskys gleefully upend the plot of many a Hercule Poirot mystery, and the result is much funnier, and much stranger, than anything ever written by Agatha Christie.