Craig Rice

Review from Amazon dot com: "Sixty-year-old Constance Lawley takes on temp housekeeping jobs as a way of keeping busy. She likes people and enjoys helping them. Her job involves running households in which someone is recovering from injury or illness. Her latest assignment is working for a charming old couple with a grandson who’s not quite normal. It looks like one of her easiest and most pleasant job — until she walks into the living room after grocery shopping and finds four dead bodies. It’s a massacre — and another person will soon be murdered too."

John J Malone / Jake & Helene Justus #4 (1941) Abandoned by his nearest and dearest, John Malone is left to drink in the New Year solo among the crowd at Joe the Angel's bar. Then, in staggers a complete stranger, bellowing Malone's name and surreptitiously passing him a key--nondescript except for the "114" on its handle--before collapsing and dying from the knife wound in his back. Still hung over more than a day later, thanks to Captain von Flanagan's unconventional style of interrogation, Malone gets a cable from honeymooning Jake, requesting fare home from Bermuda. Worse, there's bride Helene right on Malone's doorstep. The honeymoon is decidedly over. Neither Justus wants anything to do with the other, except to demonstrate an innate superiority by independently solving the perfect-crime puzzle that defeated the entire trio after Mona McClane put it to them as a bet on the day of the wedding (The Wrong Murder, series book #3). But the dead house guest discovered at Mona's house shortly after Malone and Helene arrive for cocktails doesn't fit the terms of Mona's puzzle. Instead, he bears a knife wound that's an exact match for the bar stiff's. And a slip of paper reading only "114." Happy New Year.

Crime reporter Mike Reese has a nose for news, and an eager hand under the table in return for spinning the truth in favor of moneyed perps. But after he tries to cash in on a story involving a maid accused of a society murder, Reese ultimately finds the courage to reveal the truth and make amends for his tainted past.

Widowed mystery writer Marian Carstairs is a mother of three living off the sales of her books. Her children, Dinah (14), April (12), and Archie (10), inspired by reading their mother’s fictitious mystery novels, decide to take part in some amateur sleuthing when they hear shots in the house next door. Understanding detective work from the novels, they take specific notes on clues that they encounter, but they also falsify their testimonies to the cops with the end goal of crediting the solved case back to their mother for publicity purposes.

John J Malone / Jake & Helene Justus #8 (1945) Wrongly convicted Anna Marie St. Clair has escaped the electric chair only because the hired gun fronting for the real murderer of Big Joe Childers made an eleventh-hour confession on his own death bed. Now she's playing dead and laying for the lowlife creeps who conspired to get her tried and fried. For help, she turns to John Malone, the one defense lawyer in Chicago who might have gotten her off in spite of everything, if she hadn't put her trust in Big Joe's pals instead. A smitten Malone readily agrees to join in Anna Marie's fun, but the whole haunting affair soon becomes a good deal more complicated. Turns out that Malone's pal, Jake Justus, was an unwilling side party to the Childers murder frame. Helene Justus hasn't been let in on her husband's guilty secret; nevertheless, as usual, she suspects enough to scare up a few complications herself.