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THE HAUNTED LADY by Mary Roberts  Rinehart

THE HAUNTED LADY

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Pub Date: April 7th, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61316-159-3
Publisher: Penzler Publishers

Hilda Adams, less than an official police detective but a whole lot more than a trained nurse, is dispatched to a family manse to protect the matriarch from all manner of things that go bump in the night in this reprint originally published in 1942.

Old Eliza Fairbanks maintains that somebody tried to poison her with arsenic. But it’s hard to know what to make of her claim since she also insists that her bedroom’s been invaded by “three bats, two sparrows, and a rat” in the months since her sugar was doctored. So Inspector Harlan Fuller sends Hilda (Miss Pinkerton, 1932) into the Fairbanks home, partly to protect the querulous old lady, partly to keep an eye out for further mischief. Hilda finds plenty of mischief, from the bat Mrs. Fairbanks has caught that very day to the test Dr. Courtney Brooke ran that proves that her sugar was indeed laced with arsenic. Quizzed by Hilda, Mrs. Fairbanks tells her that she trusts her servants more than her family, and it’s easy to see why. Her daughter, Marian, has bled her architect ex-husband, Frank, dry by the $10,000 in alimony he pays her each year. Shortly after their divorce seven years ago, Frank married his daughter’s governess, and now Eileen Garrison announces that she’s pregnant. Although Frank and Marian’s daughter, Janice, is selflessly attached to her grandmother, the same can’t be said for Marian’s brother, Carlton, a stockbroker ruined by the Depression, or his wife, Susie. As the family members bicker and the suspicious incidents mount, Rinehart wrings the maximum effect from her trademark flash forwards, here presented in a flat third-person, as when she begins a chapter by leaping three days into the future: “Mrs. Fairbanks was murdered on Saturday night, the fourteenth of June; or rather early on Sunday morning.” The solution to the locked-room murder relies on some state-of-the-art technology that’s dated severely, but nostalgia buffs won’t mind a bit.

A superior example of the plucky-heroine-in-an-old-dark-house school.