20–19916
A murder in New York society forms the raison d’être for this detective story. Eugene Creveling is found dead in his library early one April morning. McCarthy, the ex-roundsman detective of previous stories, constitutes himself the chief investigator. He interviews the family, social and business friends and servants of the murdered man, and finds, as he says, “every last one of them bluffing and hedging and lying,” except the O’Rourkes, former friends of his in the old country, whose integrity he would swear by. He can’t understand what the others are all working for, but gradually their motives are uncovered, and altho they have a bearing on the character and habits of the dead man, the identity of the murderer remains still a mystery. Then in a flash the solution is revealed to McCarthy by a passing glimpse of a woman’s handwriting, the last woman in the world he would want to suspect. But thru an act of what he calls Providence she is not brought to justice, and after all perhaps Creveling got no more than he deserved for playing with a woman’s honor.
N Y Times p27 Ja 2 ’21 360w Springf’d Republican p7a N 28 ’20 110w
OSTRANDER, ISABEL EGENTON (ROBERT ORR CHIPPERFIELD, DOUGLAS GRANT, pseuds.). Unseen hands. *$1.75 McBride
20–10735
“This story of Mr Chipperfield’s is placed before us as a mystery in which every member of a wealthy family seems to be menaced. The mother and the eldest son have each died under peculiar circumstances shortly before the opening of the story. We are instantly met with strange, murderous intention being disclosed in regard to the father and the second son. Such intimate knowledge of the family life is disclosed that we are forced to the conclusion that it is an ‘inside Job.’ The problem is to find the person with motive and means for such gradual but wholesale murder.”—Boston Transcript
Booklist 17:35 O ’20
“It is an unlikely situation in twentieth-century America, but capable of being quite mystifying if handled dexterously. Mr Chipperfield guards his secret well. His situations are not always screwed up to the highest pitch, but he does succeed in rousing false conjectures and the general air of suspicion which successful detective fiction demands.”