The Second Confession, Rex Stout

I'm reading through the entire Nero Wolfe series for a bunch of reasons. First, because I love them and Archie makes me laugh, especially when he's in a snit. Second, because I haven't been sleeping well lately, and a book where I don't know what happens keeps me awake, but these books have a very specific rhythm and don't. That's not a knock on these books, I swear. Sometimes when I can't sleep I listen to my favorite podcast over and over. Only favorites will do.

Another reason these books are so much fun to read is because Archie and Wolfe are always having adventures appropriate to the years they were written. A few books ago Archie had a bad feeling about that Hitler fellow, and then he joined the Army, and now he's back to civilian life and worried about Communists. (Published in 1949.)

This is also one of the books where there was an attempt to give Nero Wolfe a Moriarty and... eh. Wolfe's impassioned speech about the only! man! he! fears!! was a little tonally odd and failed to make me feel like the stakes were any higher here than in any other book. Especially because after that scene someone is killed, and it goes back to being exactly the same kind of plot as any other Wolfe book. Archie is sassy to the police and hits on a pretty girl who calls him a louse at one point. The couple of plot twists are great. It always cracks me up when there's a moment that Wolfe gets grumpy and sends Archie to his room and won't tell him what's going on with solving the mystery. I know it's to keep the readers in suspense, because in-world it barely makes sense. It's always sort of implied that Wolfe thinks Archie would tell someone or ruin catching the murderer somehow, but also Archie is the person Wolfe relies on most completely. But it does always make Archie sulky, which I always love.

(Full disclosure, the new way the kindle front page looks threw me off and I skipped two books and jumped up to this one. There is one plot point it affects, but I think it's a silly one, so I'm not letting it bother me.)

Grade: B

#22 in 2016