Kruger has been setting EV puzzles for over ten years, with a puzzle every four or five months, and the occasional Inquisitor for good measure. I have always found his crosswords fair, but quite taxing, and covering a wide range of themes. This puzzle proved fairly tough, especially my last clue, 3dn! This necessitated a correction in the following week’s paper.

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Solving time: 33 mins

This was hard, and I was grateful for a couple of hackneyed clues at 12ac (INCA) and 28ac (DETERGENT) to get me going. The theme (abbreviations for days of the week being unclued in wordplay to ten answers) jumped out early on from 16dn (FRICASSEE) and I expected that to open the floodgates, but no. Still, I got there in the end.

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