The Hand in the Dark by Arthur J. Rees

Description

Arthur J. Rees was an Australian-born newspaperman who took to detective fiction in the early years of the genre, and The Hand in the Dark, published in 1920, is widely counted his best. The Heredith family have lived in their moated Sussex manor since the seventeenth century, ever since an ancestor burned the original house down with its Royalist owner inside, and the house has carried a curse on its name ever since. In 1918 that curse gathers a house party.

The young and restless Mrs. Heredith, tired of the country, has invited her lively London friends down to cheer the place up. After dinner, as the party prepares to walk out to a neighbour’s, a scream and a shot come from her room; she is found shot at close range. Every guest, every servant, was accounted for — yet the pearls go missing too. Scotland Yard’s ambitious young detective and the veteran Superintendent both build a case, arrest a suspect, and close the file. But Philip Heredith’s son, privately convinced the wrong man is accused, hires the great private detective Grant Colwyn — and Colwyn’s methodical chase uncovers a solution far stranger than jealousy, with its roots in a ruby-haunted cave in New Zealand.

For connoisseurs of the puzzle

• A genuine locked-room-of-the-ordinary variety problem, solved by pure deduction.
• Three rival detectives, three methods — and only one of them right.
• The vanished pearl necklace that quietly upsets the official theory.

About This DodaBooks Edition

The complete 28 chapters are reset in comfortable type with a working index, keeping every clue legible and the reveal precisely timed — a clean reading copy for the modern reader.