Mary Roberts Rinehart

Was that dear little lady Emily Benton guilty of murder, or was the written confession discovered by her tenant actually trumped up? This one will keep you guessing....

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

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....

Two reclusive sisters. A crumbling mansion. A dead doppelgänger. The New York Times best seller from the author known as the American Agatha Christie. 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...

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....

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....

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....

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....

The Circular Staircase is as complex a mystery as anyone could wish for, full of twists and turns, mysterious intruders, a murder and kidnapping, bank failure, all revolving around the sinister staircase itself....

On a 100-mile expedition into the Egyptian desert, Rinehart does her best to master the herky-jerk of this desert beast....

Winter 1914. Sara Lee Kennedy reads the newspaper account of the war in Europe and is appalled. Others in her sheltered Pennsylvania home are interested only in her coming marriage....

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....

Rachel Innes rents a summer house that is full of hidden rooms and sinister happenings....

Aunt Rachel heard something last night. Gertrude heard it as well. Tonight, shots ring out, and a dead body appears at the foot of the circular staircase. Now it is up to Rachel to piece together what happened....

A cozy mystery and romance set in early 20th-century America similar to Sinclair Lewis’ landmark work Main Street, but with a softer touch and mysteries to carry the work forward....