World War II is juttered to an end, but deprivations are still palpable. Servicemen are still abroad, rations are still enforced, and supplies are very limited. Yet the New England summer set attempt to keep up appearances, opening their cottages for the season, albeit with a skeleton crew and fewer cocktail parties.
Carol Spencer, at the behest of her Newport-based mother, agrees to open the Maine summer home ahead of the rest of the family’s arrival. Expecting to find some harried housekeepers looking for clean sheets and an overgrown garden, Carol is shocked to discover the dead body of a stranger. She soon learns the hired housekeeper is in the hospital with a broken bone–acquired when she fell down the staircase trying to escape from an unknown intruder. Suddenly the empty mansion is filled with suspicious characters, accusations, snobby relatives, and nosy neighbors.
Carol felt completely confused as she went back to the library. There were things she would have to do. She would have to call Elinor at Newport and ask her to break the news to her mother as carefully as she could. But she dreaded doing it. She could see Elinor’s lifted eyebrows and her angry reaction, as though she–Carol–was responsible. ~Pg. 47
Like an Agatha Christie novel, this has the American equivalent of minor aristocracy attempting to keep their crumbling country estates viable, and ignore the erosion of their once sparkling lifestyle. Carol herself is a sympathetic character, often at the mercy of her snappish, cosmopolitan sister or her intractable mother. Naive, for certain, but also a product of a world that no longer exists, Carol is seen to at least be trying to adapt to reality, rather than fight against it.
As with so many of the mystery novels in this era, the solution is a little bit convoluted (and I’m not sure this one meets the Ronald Knox definition of fair play) but it is a good romp nonetheless. Most interesting to me was how Rinehart really allowed the effects of WWII to seep into the story. No character is untouched–injuries, loss, separation, lack all play a part in their backstories and their motives.
As I write this, I’m just watching the end of The Bat (1959) on Turner Classic Movies, an adaptation of another of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novels. Reinhart was an immensely popular American author. As Otto Penzler notes in the introduction, in “the years between the two World Wars one of a handful of of the best-selling writers in America. Not a bestselling mystery writer–a bestselling writer. … The only mystery titles that outsold her in those years were Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and two titles by S.S. Van Dine… .”
I’ve enjoyed every Rinehart book I’ve read, for various reasons. They are each an adventure and they deserve rediscovery by literary and classic mystery audiences.
My thanks to Penzler Publishers for the review copy.
Publisher: American Mystery Classics
Publication date: December 2, 2025
Print length: 360 pages (English)
ISBN-10: 1613167547