Good Reads meta-data is 202 pages 4.0 by 24 litizens
Genre: krimi
Verdict: arthritic.
Very Englishman Ludovic Travers is on his twenty-first outing in this title. Our hero gets embroiled in the art scene in Paris. Because he is so handsome, so charming, so rich, so smart, speaks such perfect French he makes friends easily. Meanwhile his personality-zero wife shops.
The book is padded with lengthy courtesies, accounts of taxi rides, and the praise heaped on Ludo by one and all. It an inflated short story. The prose is laborious and leaden. There nothing for everyone: no action, no characters, no description of time or place, no police procedural, just people praising Ludo for being handsome, charming, rich, smart, Francophone, and more.
It does have a plot twist. SPOILER. The renown artist is presenting as his own work that of drunk whom he keeps on the sauce. Or something like that.
Here’s another SPOLER for Sy fy readers: there is no donkey and no donkey flies.
The back story is slightly more interesting than the novel. Bush wrote and published the first title in this series in 1926 and quit his job as a civil service clerk to write, thereafter cranking out sixty-two (62!) novels in which Ludo is praised by one and all. The last appeared in 1968! One is enough for this reader.