It's so hard to remember which short stories were in which collection. Hang on. ...okay, after reading a bunch of goodreads reviews I got it. There's one here about a guy who had pneumonia and managed to die under possibly mysterious circumstances -- Wolfe is hired to decide if it was murder or just illness. The second one here is about Wolfe making dinner for some diplomats and the state department. It features Archie saying angrily, "Well, this is a great way to serve your country. Not!" Which I was not expecting in a novel from 1957. And in the third one a whole lot of private detectives have been summoned to testify about illegal wire-tapping activities. They were all tricked into it by the same guy, and that guy has just wound up dead, which looks pretty incriminating. The third one is great, mostly because Wolfe basically sends Archie off to do useless errands the whole time, while letting everyone else help him, and Archie is in suuuuuch a bad mood because of it.
I need some kind of different rating scale for these books, because they are all basically the same thing, but that's the joy of the series. In a week when I really needed a way to turn my brain off and stop looking at twitter or the news, a nice reliable murder mystery with a nice reliable set of characters and a nice reliable plot was exactly what I needed.
Grade: B
#78 in 2016
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