Mystery Mavens: 13 books

Sam Appleby, the former Governor of Massachusetts, pays a weekend visit to Sycamore Ridge, the Connecticut estate of his old political rival Dan Wheeler. Appleby wants Wheeler’s support for his son Appleby JR who is running for Governor, but Wheeler is a hard sell. As tension escalates between the...

Guests gather for the weekend at White Birches, the upper New York mansion of millionaire scion Justin Arnold. Festivities are cut short when the host inexplicably goes missing, presumed to be hiding or unwell somewhere within the grounds of his heavily protected, fortress-like estate. With amateur...

During the night of the great fog of 1897, five members of London’s The Grill club listen to the telling of three interconnected stories. An American gentleman begins by relating how he had gotten lost in the fog and stumbled upon a house where a double murder had just been committed. The victims...

Eccentric millionaire David Van Wyck has decided to pledge all his money away, leaving his wife Anne nothing but her jewelry to survive on. When David sees Anne flirting with an old high school friend during a weekend party at his mansion, Buttonwood Terrace, he decides to include Anne’s gems in...

A group of bored rich New Yorkers obsessed with the supernatural decide to spend a month in Black Aspens, a supposedly haunted mansion deep in Vermont’s Green Mountains. A bizarre murder is rumored to have occurred there in an infamous room with tassels. Jokes about Ouija boards and séances abruptly...

When wealthy heiress Lucy Carrington is found murdered in the bedroom of her Long Island estate, suspects abound: the rich woman’s pretty niece, the social secretary, the cousin who managed her finances, the suspicious maid, a mysterious “count” and even the strange neighbor. With police baffled,...

The quaint town of Deep Lake, Wisconsin is rocked to its core when millionaire Sampson Tracy is found murdered in a locked room -- with a nail driven into his skull and his corpse festooned with bizarre ritualistic items. Is the rich man’s slaying the work of a local cult or is someone closer to...

Madison Avenue attorney Tom Brice is working late one night when he overhears an argument raging in the adjoining office suite belonging to the mysterious recluse Amos Gately. A gunshot rings out. Brice panics and flees but his conscience gets the better of him. Returning, he enters Gately’s office...

A fortune hunter expected home from a diamond mining expedition to South Africa turns up murdered, with his false hand missing. Suspects abound, including the fiancé of the dead man’s daughter. But why was the adventurer murdered? And why did the killer steal his victim’s wooden hand? This...

Fleming Stone Mystery #8 is a courtroom drama centering on the slaying of a Bronx businessman whose body is discovered in a remote corner of Van Cortlandt Park. The dead man’s last words were “Cain killed me,” which leads investigators to the victim’s nephew Kane Landon. But was ‘Cain’...

Sir Herbert Binney, millionaire owner of ‘Binney’s Buns,’ is found murdered in the ritzy lobby of the New York apartment hotel where he lives with his mother and aunt. The two women are bun-baking competitors and have been mortal enemies for decades. A partially written note discovered with...

Wealthy New York widow Ursula Pell enjoys hosting parties and playing cruel jokes on her guests. If anyone complains about the humiliating mistreatment, she threatens to cut them out of her will. When Ursula’s dead body is discovered in a locked-room the morning after a dinner party, suspicion initially...

When the White family comes into the possession of a monkey’s paw that magically grant wishes, they do what many people would do—they wish for money. But every wish has a consequence, and the White family finds they are completely unprepared for what comes next. This new 2017 edition of The Monkey’s Paw includes W. W. Jacob's chilling short story In the Library.