Summary: When Campion is invited to the second funeral in six months for an old school acquaintance, he finds him drawn into a murder investigation where the murders keep coming.

When Albert Campion finds himself staring at the corpse of a man he thought buried six months ago, he knows something strange is afoot. Only he doesn’t reckon how strange it is and that his involvement has placed him and Lugg in danger. Supposedly this man is Harris, the brother and heir of the man buried six months ago, R. I. “Pig” Peters. But one look is enough to persuade Campion that this is Pig, an old school nemesis. He died from a blow to the head from an urn that fell from a balustrade above the patio where he was sleeping off a hangover on a lounge chair.

Six months ago, he was surprised to be invited to the funeral by means of a strange verse. Another attendee, Whippet had a similar invite. Campion also notices the fiancée of Pig. All these turn up again at the second death (including the notes in which moles feature prominently), occurring at the estate of old friend Leo Pursuivant. After Campion mentions the need for further examination of the body, it goes missing, only to turn up in the river. Then another grisly murder is found, of a man called Hayhoe, stabbed in the neck and hung on a gibbet like a scarecrow. Clearly, a clever and ruthless killer is abroad in the village of Kepesake. An investigator cannot be too careful, as Campion discovers to his regret.

A unique feature is that this is written as a first-person account by Campion, unlike earlier numbers in the series. I thought it a refreshing change of pace. We also gain sympathy for Campion, who struggles to win the affections of Leo’s daughter Janet, and keeps getting on her wrong side. This is a short, briskly-paced story that works up to an edge-of-the-seat conclusion. ( )

Albert Campion should know that more is going on than the apparent but this is a tale of bungling as much as anything as he sees the body of a man whose funeral he attended months before. ( )

This is unusual. It's narrated in the first person by Albert Campion himself, which is not how the remainder of the series have been written so far.
It starts with a funeral in January of Pig Peters, someone who Campion went to school with and at whose hands he suffered being bullied.
Come June and there's a body turned up in a country village of some friends of his, and so Campion goes to try and sort it out - only to find that the body appears to be that of Pig himself. This time he has had is head bashed in by a giant flower urn from a parapet - no chance of rising from the dead this time, although the body does go walkabouts at one point - Pig appears to be a particularly active corpse.
From the varied range of people present in the environs, Campion has to work out who is what they say they are and who is dissembling. There's a lot of misdirection, and a close call at the end before the villain is exposed.
It's entertaining and engaging. ( )

Although this mystery has a clever crime, the characters are dull and uninteresting. ( )

I liked the plot & story, I didn't like how it was written... The writing and going around & around was confusing...

Albert Campion's valet, Lugg, reads the Death notices to Campion every morning while Campion has his breakfast. The current notices include a funeral for Pig Perry, a childhood tormentor of Albert and so he attends. Oddly there are few others in attendance, the Vicar, an odd young woman, an older man, and another man whom Albert & Pig also knew as a child.

Months go by and Albert is called upon by a friend to investigate the death of a man who was plotting the hostile take-over of a quiet country hotel, a sort of club for the older gentlemen of the town. A drunken man seemingly goes to sleep in a lawn chair and killed when he's hit on the head by a falling cement flower urn which has been in place for hundreds of years!

The problem is the man bears an exact resemblance to the late Pig Perry... Could it be that Pig had a brother? During the investigation of the death of Pig's "brother", they odd woman from the funeral turns up as do the others from the funeral. No one it seems is who they purport to be. ( )