Fans of the classic horror stories "August Heat" and "The Beast With Five Fingers" will welcome their author's return with a sedate Yorkshire detective story out of print since its first publication in 1934.Blanket manufacturer Athelstan Digby is minding the bookshop owned by his landlord, Daniel Lavender, when the Rev. Percival Offord, of Worpleswick Vicarage, enters to ask whether the shop has a copy of John Bunyan's The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Digby doesn't know, and a search through the shelves turns up only copies of Bunyan's Holy War and Pilgrim's Progress. But Digby doesn't need to look when another customer arrives an hour later asking for The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, or when a chauffeur turns up toward evening seeking the same title. The series of non-coincidences is capped half an hour later when a boy follows the three customers to sell a parcel of books he's been given by Diana Conyers of Deepdale End, one of which just happens to be The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Before Digby and his curious nephew, Dr. Jim Pickering, can venture more than a few guesses as to why Bunyan's book would suddenly be such a hot commodity, one of its prospective purchasers is found dead, followed by another. By the second murder, Digby and Pickering have already branched off in different directions in search of answers. They both get hoodwinked by their quarry, neither of them shines as a detective, and the repeated conversations in which they review the evidence keep much suspense from building. But the story maintains a low-key charm that makes it well worth sticking with till the final anticlimax.Harvey makes a strong case for the existence 90 years ago of a cozy procedural.