Cousin captivates, then leaves you cold

My Cousin Rachel is a murder mystery. The mystery is whether there was a murder at all—or whether there might have been two. Philip Ashley tells the story. His bachelor cousin Ambrose, who brought him up as his heir, goes off to Italy for his health. While there, Ambrose meets and marries a half-Italian distant [...]

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Graustark thrills in storybook setting

George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark begins as a mystery, but quickly turns into a romance before accelerating into a thriller climaxed by a story-book ending. On an east-bound train from Denver, Grenfall Lorry meets the lovely Miss Guggenslocker heading back to the Graustark capital, Edelweiss, accompanied by her aunt and uncle. With help from the Paris [...]

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Romantic thriller will leave you thinking

Mary Roberts Rinehart, noted for her mysteries, hit the bestseller list in 1921 with a romantic thriller. A Poor Wise Man is an exciting read that leaves readers with plenty to think about. Lily Cardew, heir to the Cardew steel fortune, is home after a year of war work in Ohio. Labor trouble is brewing [...]

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A lovely place for an absurd novel

On his death bed, James Grenfell Kent, 36, sergeant in the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, confesses to a murder he didn’t commit. From his deathbed, he also  falls in love with the mysterious raven-haired beauty, Maretta, who tells him she knows who really committed the murder. Instead of dying, Kent recovers, which means he’ll be [...]

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Silence is not golden

Daughter of Silence opens with Anna Albertini shooting the mayor of San Stefano to death at noon before turning herself in to police. There’s no doubt Anna is guilty of murder. The only question is whether mitigating circumstances should be considered in her sentencing. In a plot reminiscent of Robert L. Traver’s Anatomy of a [...]

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Impersonation is great mystery

The Great Impersonation is a mystery set in duplicity and compounded by international espionage. In German West Africa around 1910, Everard Dominey, a gone-to-seed Englishman whose only asset is fluent German, runs into a school mate, now a German commander. The two had always looked remarkably alike. Von Ragastein has been exiled by the Kaiser [...]

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River’s End Holds Unexpected Laughs

With its mix of Western adventure, mistaken identity, mystery, and romance, James Oliver Curwood’s 1920 bestseller, The River’s End, reads like Hollywood film plot. As he is dying, lawman Derwent Conniston urges the outlaw John Keith to assume his identify and thus evade recapture for the killing of Judge Kirkstone. The two men look as [...]

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What a difference a day makes

In Twenty-Four Hours, Louis Bromfield takes a plot that appears to be plodding off in one direction, gives it more twists than a bag of pretzels, and turns out a story that seems perfectly plausible. As the curtain rises, old Hector Champion is giving a dreary dinner to distract himself from worry over the results [...]

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The Door conceals classy murder mystery

Mary Roberts Rinehart can be counted on for mysteries with a cast of people with motive for murder and a maze of clues. Her novel The Door is in the classic “the butler did it” tradition, complete with a butler. Readers get all the clues they need to solve the murder, with enough red herrings [...]

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Ourselves to Know Is Full of Surprises

In Ourselves to Know, John O’Hara presents a riveting story of complex people in a deceptively innocent-appearing era.

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