Mary Roberts Rinehart

"An astonishing story of love and mystery, which equals if not surpasses in interest those other lively stories of Mrs. Rinehart's. The novel is one of the sprightliest of the season and will add to the author's reputation as an inventor of 'queer' plots.

Riveting and compelling. The Wall tells the inspiring story of forty men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto. John Hersey's novel documents the Warsaw ghetto both as an emblem of Nazi persecution and as a personal confrontation with torture, starvation, humiliation, and cruelty- a gripping and visceral story, impossible to put down. "Only a true novelist could breathe warmth, compassion, humor, into what a historian would necessarily have pictured as a stark, hopeless tragic series of events. Only a sensitive novelist could compel us to embark upon such a fearful adventure as this and remain until the end" -The New York Times "A searching, heroic story." -The Atlantic

Mrs. Pittman is missing a tenant. Young Jenny Brice has vanished, leaving behind a blood-stained rope and towel. Could it be murder? With no body to show the police, the determined landlady must solve the case herself. This 1913 mystery is set in Rinehart’s home town of Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh.

Reprint of the 1932 novel. It was also reissued with another novel and two short stories as "Miss Pinkerton, Adventures of a Nurse Detective."

In a crumbling mansion, two sisters hide from the world, afraid for their lives The Birches was one of the grand mansions of the 1920s, with a ballroom, tennis courts, and, of course, a swimming pool. But after the crash of ’29, when Lois and Judith’s father killed himself to escape his debts, the family turned the summer home into a fulltime retreat from the world. Decades later, Judith is the queen of New York society, a fast-living beauty whose nerves are beginning to fray, while Lois still lives in the dilapidated old mansion, writing mystery novels to pay the bills. She is about to encounter a mystery of her own. To stave off a nervous breakdown, Judith moves in with her kid sister. Terrified of an unnamed threat, she nails her windows shut and locks the door. Soon, a woman is found dead in the pool—a stranger who bears a shocking resemblance to Judith. In a family with a history of tragedy, a chilling new chapter is about to be written. Judith Chandler has always been the spoiled beauty of the family, but something has gone terribly wrong. With a deadline to meet on her latest detective novel, Lois has no patience to deal with her sister's fears. Until a real-life mystery begins to unfold. For one night, Judith disappears from her locked bedroom, and in the morning, a woman's body is found floating in the swimming pool.

The stabbing death of her sister-in-law leaves young socialite Judy Shepard scratching her head over the seemingly nonexistant motive, and the murder weapon, which keeps disappearing and reappearing mysteriously.

Three of Rinehart’s pre-WWI mysteries, all best-sellers in their day. Reviews from Goodreads. The Circular Staircase – (Wealthy spinster Rachel Innes gets mixed up in a series of strange crimes at a summer house she has rented with her niece and nephew). “For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-bye to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof. And then -- the madness seized me. When I look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. “ The Man in Lower Ten – “Lawrence Blakely, an attorney-in-law carrying important papers, stumbles on a murder aboard a train. Meanwhile, his bag containing the valuable documents has been stolen, along with his clothes, and he's being accused of the killing when the train is wrecked. Blakely and a mysterious young woman may be the car's only survivors.” The Case of Jennie Brice “A blood-stained rope and towel, and a missing tenant, convince Mrs. Pittman that a murder has been committed in her boarding house. But without a body, the police say there is no case. Now, it's up to Mrs. Pittman to ferret out the killer. For as the landlady, she has the perfect excuse to do a little snooping--and the key to Jennie's apartment.”

Upon reopening her summer home in Maine, twenty-four-year-old Carol Spencer finds a charred corpse in a linen closet, and when Carol becomes the police's prime suspect, she attempts to clear her name by uncovering the real murderer

The Halls, Lancasters, Talbots, Wellingtons, and Daltons--five close-knit and well-to-do families living on exclusive Crescent Place--retreat into terrified paranoia when first old Mrs. Lancaster is found hacked to death with an axe and then other victims are discovered

The Fairbanks curse... When Hilda Adams came to the Fairbanks' mansion as nurse/companion to old Eliza Fairbanks, she was warned that Eliza was prey to sick fancies...insane fears. But soon Hilda discovered that the evil obsessing the old lady was no spectre of madness...that no one in this house of hate and strange deception could be trusted, not even the disturbingly attentive and attractive Fairbanks' heir...that the terrible secret that touched every life with fear was reaching out to claim Hilda as its helpless victim.

Love was the furthest thing from Patricia Abbott's mind when she met Tony Wainwright. Though he was heir to the Wainwright fortune and the magnificent family mansion known as the Cloisters, the rumors of his private revels hinted at a dark and sinister decadence. And there was something else -- a woman Tony never spoke about, hidden away in the shadows... a woman who was his wife. But it was already too late. As Tony drew her into a dangerous liaison, Patricia became enmeshed in an inescapable web of lies, secrets, and cold-blooded murder...

Inheriting an isolated lakeside estate that is shrouded in ghost stories, skeptical William Porter and his wife are astonished when they are beckoned by a shadowy apparition and wonder if a ghost or a deadly stranger is responsible.

The state has accused beautiful young Elinor Norton of murder, and she refuses to mount a defense. Guilt is written all over her elegant features, but her childhood best friend refuses to believe it when Elinor confesses to the crime. Forced into a dull marriage against her will, Elinor is just beginning to adjust to life with Lloyd when she meets the man who will tear her world apart. Blair Leighton is her husband’s best friend and was his companion in the war, and he has a charm that makes Elinor quiver from the inside out. At first, her husband is oblivious to this illicit attraction, but when the two men go into business together, the tension threatens to rip the triangle apart. Soon, Elinor is forced to make a chilling decision. One of these men must die—but which?

A boarder comes to live with three women and finds them frighteningly strange From the outside, it seems like the three women of the Bayne house are frozen in time. There is Mrs. Bayne, an aging widow obsessed with propriety; her sister, Margaret, a spinster whose desperate loneliness is eating her from the inside out; and young Holly, a beautiful creature with a vibrancy that fades a little each day. Her only hope is Furness Brooks, a playboy with an idea that he might like to marry Holly, but each day that he doesn’t propose, she becomes more frightened that she will die an old maid. Into this steps Howard Warrington, a bond salesman who answers an advertisement to rent the Baynes’ extra room. He finds the house to be full of old secrets and quiet grudges, and he soon grows to hate his life there. But when Margaret attempts to kill herself, he realizes how dark life is for the women Bayne—and how difficult it might be for him to escape.