Mary Roberts Rinehart

In an elaborate house known as the Cloisters, Maud Wainwright rules supreme. The queen of society in the small town of Beverly, she has a table long enough to seat 100, and she keeps an iron grip on the guest list. Her right-hand woman is Pat Abbott, a local girl who is beautiful, innocent, and...

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...

A killer has an axe to grind in this classic whodunit from the number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Circular Staircase and mystery-writing pioneer. Crescent Place was once a peaceful country green surrounded by five tasteful suburban houses and populated by polite, responsible...

Murder visits a seaside mansion in this gothic mystery from the number one New York Times best-selling author known as the American Agatha Christie. The house called Sunset has been Marcia's summer home for her entire life. Both of her parents died there, and she and her brother spent their...

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. A strange figure appears briefly in the twilight outside a window. At night, a rattling...

An isolated country house sets the scene for a wartime mystery from the number-one New York Times best-selling author known as the American Agatha Christie. As far as Carol Spencer is concerned, the war has spoiled everything. She and Don had been engaged for years and were on the verge of...

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 the old doctor dies...

There are so many kinds of love: romantic, filial, spiritual … The following stories by Mary Roberts Rinehart present all sorts of love: “Twenty-two” “Jane” “In the Pavilion” “God’s Fool” “The Miracle” “Are We Downhearted? No!” “The Game” Many of the stories take...

Mary Roberts Rinehart, known for her bestselling 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. After convincing her editor at The Saturday...

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. How can a made-up paramour appear at a ball? Will Bab...

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. She moves in with her niece and an unpredictable Irish maid and is confronted by an...

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the same things. Characters come, move about, and make their final exits through long-familiar doors. And the backdrop remains approximately the same from...

Corrupt politician Allan Fleming has disappeared, and his daughter Margery asks attorney Jack Knox to find him. When Fleming turns up murdered at a sleazy social club called the White Cat, Margery commissions Knox to clear her fiancé, the less-than-scrupulous Harry Wardrop, of all suspicion...

“This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous.” So...

The blood-stained rope and towel, the stray slipper, the broken knife—and the disappearance of the lovely Jennie Brice—were enough to convince Mrs. Pitman that murder had been commited in her boardinghouse. The police, however, were another matter. Without a tangible body, there could be no...

There's been an awful murder at Elizabeth Bell's otherwise quiet household in this classic mystery from the author of The Yellow Room. Elizabeth Bell runs a quiet household, with no family and no more than the usual number of servants. She passes her time thinking about crime and working on her...