Mary Roberts Rinehart

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...

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...

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. Pittman that murder had been committed in her boarding house. The police, however, were another matter. Without a tangible body, there could be...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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. After convincing her editor at The Saturday...