East is East: If Tomokeho Matsuda only speaks Japanese, as stated in the novel, how did he manage to read the English-language note supposedly from him, meant to lure Bennet Alderman into a trap? The novel also states that he read it on sight, so there were no English-Japanese dictionaries or "hey, official translator on my staff, what does this say?" going on here. (The answer is probably that one of the two authors included in the Emma Lathen pseudonym lost track of who spoke what languages.)
In Going for the Gold, Thatcher and his allies conclude that the murder was the result of a dishonest but not initially murderous person Jumping Off the Slippery Slope in order to silence the murder victim, Yves Bisson, who was working with the murderer to pull off a big theft but made an incriminating mistake. However, the murderer had a rifle on hand to kill Yves when there was no legitimate reason to bring one to Lake Placid and it would have been hard getting one without leaving behind evidence in the few hours it took to plan the murder. This could mean that the murderer was always going to kill Yves out of No Honor Among Thieves greed and just changed the timing of the crime in response to Bisson's mistake.
