Today’s readers of crime fiction have come to expect a writer to supplement a mystery’s central riddle with psychologically apt meditations on the nature of evil. Eric Wright’s latest Charlie Salter mystery bucks this trend, returning to the classic Agatha Christie-pioneered approach, where the author and reader match wits over a puzzle, the evil is safely domestic and rationally explicable, and the who- matters more than the whydunit.

Wright’s stolid police inspector, on the verge of retirement, is asked to investigate the death of an upper-crust bachelor lawyer, who, like most of Wright’s characters, is more a collection of attributes (Granite Club member, Muskoka cottager, Japanese-art collector) than a once-breathing human. Using a succession of recognizable types, Wright renders the two solitudes of the Toronto legal community – the attractive renegades of the criminal bar and their more buttoned-down cousins, the skyscraper-bound counsellors to blue-chip corporations. The last hand of the title, an expertly constructed set piece, pits Salter against a collection of these legalists in a poker game. Card games figure in many Wright works, and he’s mastered the writer’s essential shark trick: disguise the finesse until the cards go down.

The tidiness of this central scene is the exception, though. Threads are picked up and dropped summarily throughout the book. Salter’s Scottish assistant is vividly sketched and then retreats to the background. Wright also never knits the private and professional Salters together, as P.D. James does to such strong effect with her creation, Adam Dalgliesh. The book alternately recounts Salter’s progress in the investigation and his sons’ struggles to become card-carrying adults, but there’s no hint that events in one sphere affect the inspector’s behaviour in the other.

While Wright betters many of his contemporaries in constructing a tight problem – the novel’s clues are deftly hidden among the red herrings – in today’s grit-filled context The Last Hand feels figuratively if not literally bloodless.