Mary Roberts Rinehart

A young lawyer survives a ghastly train wreck only to be accused of murdering a man who accidentally fell asleep in the wrong berth....

Rinehart's first book, The Circular Staircase, may have paved the way for Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles as the second does Agatha's Tommy and Tuppence series, which combined a thriller and mystery with a love match....

Twenty-year-old Halsey and 24-year-old Gertrude, nephew and niece of Rachel Inness, a well-to-do middle-aged spinster, talk Rachel into renting a large country house for the summer....

From "The American Agatha Christie" comes a rollicking insightful tale with fun and suspense along the way....

New York socialite Kit McNair decides to host an impromptu dinner party at the home of her friend, Jimmy Wilson, to cheer him up following his divorce....

Rachel Innes, a middle-aged spinster, has barely settled in at the country house she has rented for the summer when a series of bizarre and violent events threaten to perturb her normally unflappable nature....

Where There’s a Will is Mary Roberts Rinehart’s hilarious comedy involving a health spa, an heir, a would-be princess, and an impostor. The story is told by Minnie, who has essentially run the spa for years and inherited the care of its famous spring from her father....

When Agnes Blakiston and her maid Maggie take possession of a rental house for the summer, their idea of a tranquil stay is almost immediately upended. First, there is the telephone. It rings late at night, just one ring, but there is never anyone on the line.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, known for her best-selling mystery novels such as The Circular Staircase published in 1907, earned a reputation as “the American Agatha Christie” through the success of her novels. Yet Rinehart was also a WWI correspondent....

Precocious seventeen-year-old Bab, with a sizeable sense of the romantic and an over-developed sense of the dramatic, shares how these traits get her into continuous scrapes via school themes, journals, and articles meant for publication....

Letitia Carberry, Tish to her friends, is off again on three entirely different adventures. Tish, Aggie and Lizzie, three middle-aged spinsters, are on track to create havoc wherever they go, but Tish is definitely the ringleader and leads where the other two ladies would rather not go....

Letitia Carberry is not your ordinary spinster aunt. Letitia, Tish to her friends, entangles her friends Aggie and Lizzie into all sorts of adventures and scrapes from solving a murder, car races and camping, and horse trekking. Letitia Carberry is a force to be reckoned with....

The Circular Staircase is a mystery novel by American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart. The story follows dowager Rachel Innes as she thwarts a series of strange crimes at a summer house she has rented with her niece and nephew....

An older woman of the elite class has lots of money and abundant courage and determination. Miss Cornelia Van Gorder wants some adventure in her life, so she rents a large mansion to see what she can stir up....

This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy’s memory - and of something more. You’ll hear all about it....

Rinehart's first American mystery published in 1908, reminding Agatha Christie fans of her first country-house English mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published 12 years later....

Natalie Spencer was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess. Like most women of futile lives, she lacked a sense of proportion, and the small and unimportant details of the service absorbed her. Such conversation as she threw at random, to right and left, was trivial and distracted....

Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now a part of the city of Pittsburgh, floods frequently and Mrs. Pittman has her boat tied to the stair banister, just inside the front door. It's 1904 and Jennie Brice, a stage actress, is missing from Mrs. Pittman's respectable boarding house....

With all the elements of a timeless mystery, Mary Roberts Rinehart first published The Window at the White Cat in 1910. John Knox is an attorney, not a detective, but Margery turns to him when her father, Allan Fleming, the State Treasurer, does not return home....

Precocious 17-year-old Bab, with a sizeable sense of the romantic and an over-developed sense of the dramatic, shares how these traits get her into continuous scrapes via school themes, journals, and articles meant for publication....