MISS PINKERTON

When an aged matriarch’s unloved nephew is shot to death, Inspector Patton sends for Hilda Adams to nurse the matriarch and incidentally keep her ear to the ground for clues.

Did Herbert Wynne shoot himself without leaving any gunpowder marks on his forehead? Did the gun go off accidentally? Or was he murdered? The firm that recently sold him a life insurance policy worth $100,000 would love to believe the first alternative, which would allow them to deny his estate’s claim on the money. His imperious, fading aunt, Juliet Mitchell, and everyone else who knew him—Miss Mitchell’s last surviving servants, Mary and her husband, Hugo; her attending physician, Dr. David Stewart; her lawyer, Arthur Glenn, and his secretary, Florence Lenz; and Herbert’s fiancee, Paula Brent, who seems to be in love with someone else—would rather believe the second, which would reassure them about their own safety. And of course genre fans everywhere will avidly seize on the third. “I’m no detective,” Nurse Adams tartly tells Patton, and she certainly has a point; when he finally reveals the solution to the mystery, she’s flabbergasted. But her unmistakable talent for drawing people out, overhearing revealing snatches of conversation, and stumbling on and sometimes over physical clues makes her a nondetective well worth rooting for in this reprint of a 1932 novel. As Carolyn Hart’s introduction points out, Rinehart was the founder and leading exponent of the had-I-but-known school, distinguished by the narrator’s frequent coy hints of impending doom (“sleep she did, for at least part of a night which was to be filled with horror for me”). But Nurse Adams is so levelheaded, focused, proactive, and omnicompetent in the face of mounting threats and scares that not even the moment when she’s accused of killing her patient can slow her down for long.

More creaky and less gripping than its sequel, Haunted Lady (1942), but still a welcome resurrection of its prolific, bestselling author’s only continuing detective.