The twenty-six clues

Description

"The Twenty-Six Clues" by Isabel Ostrander is a detective novel written in the early 20th century. The story launches with a shocking murder staged in a wealthy collector’s “crime museum,” drawing together a scientific criminologist, an ex-policeman and his stalwart friend, and an official inspector to untangle a taunting puzzle. Expect a clash between laboratory certainty and human fallibility, secrets in refined households, and a trail of tangible clues. It promises a brisk, clue-by-clue mystery led by a small ensemble of contrasting sleuths. The opening of the novel finds Calvin Norwood, an ardent collector of crime relics, hosting Wade Terhune (a coolly scientific investigator), ex-roundsman Timothy McCarty, his friend Dennis Riordan, and Norwood’s blind French secretary, Victor Marchal. In Norwood’s museum, a blanket is lifted to reveal not a skeleton but Evelyn Jarvis—Norwood’s neighbor—freshly strangled, her perfume betraying her identity as her husband Oliver soon arrives in anguish. Inspector Druet takes charge while Terhune notes a long black hair caught in an unbolted rear window and a ladder outside, inferring the body was brought in from the Jarvis home via a shared garden door. At that house, Evelyn’s dressing-room is found ransacked and the wall safe forced, yet the family jewels were already in a vault and her distinctive emerald ring remains. Servant accounts raise doubts—Margot insists the rooms were orderly between seven and eight, the cook and butler were out, and the housemaid claims a blinding toothache—suggesting precise timing or inside knowledge. Back in the museum a chauffeur’s glove is discovered wedged on the ladder, and the missing skeleton dramatically drops from the chimney, leaving a tight cluster of physical clues and conflicting testimony to launch the case. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Subjects

• New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
• Detective and mystery stories
• Murder -- Investigation -- Fiction
• PS