The Door

Auteur

Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) was the most beloved and best-selling mystery writer in America in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Pittsburgh to the owner of a sewing machine factory, she wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909), established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn't long before she was a regular on bestseller lists.Among her dozens of novels were The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911) and The Bat (1932), which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane's Batman. Today, Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she was much more popular than Christie during her heyday.

Texte du rabat

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 biography of a relative. When a young cousin comes to stay, life in the house becomes uncharacteristically lively. First, cousin Judy burns a hole in Miss Bell's desk. Next, they spy a burglar on the staircase-a shadowy figure who vanishes without a trace. And finally, Sarah, the nurse, takes the dogs for a walk and never returns.

But these mysterious goings-on take a dark turn when the vanished woman is found savagely murdered. According to the police, the killer must be part of the household, a fact which Ms. Bell struggles to believe. That is until more deaths follow, and the entire staff begins to look more threatening than the old lady ever could have imagined.

An atmospheric whodunit bursting with family secrets and period details, The Door exemplifies the sort of aristocratic intrigue that made Mary Roberts Rinehart one of the bestselling and most beloved authors of her day.