Roderick Alleyn

A game of Murder turns deadly when it ends in a real murder, in the country-house of Sir Hubert Handesley. Roderick Alleyn's first case.

With the notion of bringing together the most bitter of enemies for his own amusement, a bored, mischievous millionaire throws a house party. As a brutal snowstorm strands the unhappy guests, the party receives a most unwelcome visitor: death. Now the brilliant inspector Roderick Alleyn must step in to decipher who at the party is capable of cold-blooded murder. Inspector Alleyn receives a late invitation to a decidedly unsocial function, when a jaded millionaire is murdered at his own gala event. Reissue.

Often regarded as her most interesting book and set on New Zealand's North Island, Ngaio Marsh herself considered this to be her best-written novel. It was a horrible death -- Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, far from home on a wartime quest for German agents, knew that any number of people could have killed him: the English exiles he'd hated, the New Zealanders he'd despised or the Maoris he'd insulted. Even the spies he'd thwarted -- if he wasn't a spy himself!

Lord Pastern invited his society friends to a swank London nightclub to watch him stage one of his bizarre jokes. But when the joke turned in the "accidental" death of a band member, the laughter stopped. For the audience, it was an open-and-shut case. Everyone had seen the eccentric lord fire the gun. For Inspector Alleyn of Scotland Yard, this case was more bizarre than his lordship's joke - for it wasn't a bullet that killed the accordian player!