Mary Roberts Rinehart

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....

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....

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 Bat" is a Broadway play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood first produced in 1920. The plot relates how wealthy spinster Cornelia...

"The Window at the White Cat" (1910) is a detective novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Excerpt from the book: "In my criminal...

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

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....