Review by Booklist Review
Editor Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics series continues with another from Rinehart, whose The Red Lamp (1925) was reissued last fall. This work, from 1932, stars nurse Hilda Adams (the protagonist of several Rinehart novels), who is called to care for a frail, elderly woman who is abed after finding her nephew dead. It's not Adams' first crime scene; the police often arrange for her services when they need eyes inside a patient's home. But this may be her most confounding case yet. Is it a murder made to look like a suicide? A suicide made to look like a murder? Or is it a simple accident? Right from Adams' arrival at the home, strong foreshadowing lets readers know that the original crime won't be the only one. The relatively few and amusingly uptight characters who populate the mystery, along with the house itself as a cauldron of secrets, lies, and danger, provide the main appeal in this intricate portrayal of upper-class wealth, romance, and desperate face-saving. Fans of Agatha Christie will be pleased with this welcome reissue.--Henrietta Verma Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
First published in 1932, this clever entry in the American Mystery Classics series from Rinehart (1876-1958) introduces Hilda Adams, a nurse who uses her professional status to aid the police in an unnamed city that could be New York. The self-effacing lead doesn't claim to be a detective, despite the Miss Pinkerton moniker bestowed on her by Inspector Patton; rather, she believes she just has "eyes to use and the chance to use them where the police could not." Patton sends Miss Adams to the home of one of the city's leading families, the Mitchells, where she finds distraught elderly Juliet Mitchell in need of nursing care and Juliet's 24-year-old nephew, Herbert Wynne, dead from a gunshot. Miss Adams rejects the family doctor's opinion that Wynne killed himself, and uses her role as Juliet's nurse to gather more evidence. Readers should be prepared for some dated passages ("Like all women, I feel safer with a light," Miss Adams says). Overall, this is an entertaining puzzle mystery that stands the test of time. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
When an aged matriarch's unloved nephew is shot to death, Inspector Patton sends for Hilda Adams to nurse the matriarch and incidentally keep her ear to the ground for clues.Did Herbert Wynne shoot himself without leaving any gunpowder marks on his forehead? Did the gun go off accidentally? Or was he murdered? The firm that recently sold him a life insurance policy worth $100,000 would love to believe the first alternative, which would allow them to deny his estate's claim on the money. His imperious, fading aunt, Juliet Mitchell, and everyone else who knew himMiss Mitchell's last surviving servants, Mary and her husband, Hugo; her attending physician, Dr. David Stewart; her lawyer, Arthur Glenn, and his secretary, Florence Lenz; and Herbert's fiancee, Paula Brent, who seems to be in love with someone elsewould rather believe the second, which would reassure them about their own safety. And of course genre fans everywhere will avidly seize on the third. "I'm no detective," Nurse Adams tartly tells Patton, and she certainly has a point; when he finally reveals the solution to the mystery, she's flabbergasted. But her unmistakable talent for drawing people out, overhearing revealing snatches of conversation, and stumbling on and sometimes over physical clues makes her a nondetective well worth rooting for in this reprint of a 1932 novel. As Carolyn Hart's introduction points out, Rinehart was the founder and leading exponent of the had-I-but-known school, distinguished by the narrator's frequent coy hints of impending doom ("sleep she did, for at least part of a night which was to be filled with horror for me"). But Nurse Adams is so levelheaded, focused, proactive, and omnicompetent in the face of mounting threats and scares that not even the moment when she's accused of killing her patient can slow her down for long.More creaky and less gripping than its sequel, Haunted Lady (1942), but still a welcome resurrection of its prolific, bestselling author's only continuing detective. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
