Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mrs. Pittman's well-to-do Pittsburgh family didn't approve of her marriage, so the young bride moved away and lost touch with her relatives. Years later, she has returned to her native city as a widow and now runs a boarding house, one of the only jobs available to respectable women in the early twentieth century. Rooms at Mrs. Pittman's place are cheap because of the annual floods from the Allegheny River, which inundate the building's basement and...

If duty called, would you leave the confines of your cushy life to dedicate yourself to the service of the greater good? That's what Sara Lee, the altruistic heroine of Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Amazing Interlude, decides to do amidst the terror and tumult of World War I. Based on the author's own experiences as one of the first prominent female war correspondents, this novel provides a fascinating glimpse into the horror of war—and

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Three murders take place among a group of wealthy people summering at a Maine resort. A tale of mystery, personal relationships, and emotional reaction.

"Even in the early 1930s, Crescent Place is a neighborhood out of the past. The five Victorian mansions and the remote patch of pasture placed between them have the air of the 1890s, even as the city--once miles away from this idyllic retreat--encroaches and surrounds the enclave. But while these rarified residences may appear calm on the outside, their isolated interiors contain dark secrets, prolonged feuds, and generations of high-toned trouble....

In a nearly empty house, a young woman finds herself alone with a killer As far as Carol Spencer is concerned, the war has spoiled everything. She and Don had been engaged for years and were on the verge of marriage when he was shot down in the South Pacific, leaving Carol on the verge of spinsterhood at twenty-four. She wants to take some kind of job in the war effort, but her invalid mother demands that Carol accompany her to the family's summer...

The medical profession is supplying background for first rate novels-and this combines the authenticity of first hand knowledge with the sureness of touch of Mrs. Rinehart at her best....A meaty novel (nary a whiff of mystery) about the two forces in a doctor's life, his love of his profession at odds with his love of a woman. Always the profession comes to thwart his romance, circumstances drive him into another marriage and it is through the wife...

In a crumbling mansion, two sisters hide from the world, afraid for their lives The Birches was one of the grand mansions of the 1920s, with a ballroom, tennis courts, and, of course, a swimming pool. But after the crash of '29, when Lois and Judith's father killed himself to escape his debts, the family turned the summer home into a fulltime retreat from the world. Decades later, Judith is the queen of New York society, a fast-living beauty whose...

Nine short stories from one of the nation's finest mystery authors When her husband demands a divorce, a young wife heads to Reno alone, leaving the baby with her husband and his new beloved, betting that a week trapped between his child and his mistress will make her hubby yearn for her return. By the sea, a hairdresser gets into mischief over a star sports fisherman. And in a city threatened by conflict, a World War I veteran tries to make himself...

Before Agatha Christie, there was America's Mistress of Mystery. This is the story of her life and creative legacy, from the butler who did it to Batman. In the decades since her death in 1958, master storyteller Mary Roberts Rinehart has often been compared to Agatha Christie. But while Rinehart was once a household name, today she is largely forgotten. The woman who first proclaimed "the butler did it" was writing for publication years before Christie's...