Not great, to be honest...
This is probably the least known of Hammett's limited repertoire and for good reason. The writing's reasonable, and the characters of moderate interest, but the plot is terrible.
Like all Hammett's this was serialized from his pulp short stories, but is not so fluent from one to another as his other works. It breaks down into three segments that should have remained completely separate short stories, which would have stood up far better independently. As a consequence, the third and final case tries to string everything together to pin the whole thing on the most obvious of suspects for the least obvious and most convoluted of motives.
It became a bit of a slog towards the end and frankly I'm glad it is over.
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