The Greene Murder Case

A Manhattan family is murdered one member at a time in a shuttered house on the East River, and Philo Vance reads the pattern in the criminology books of the family library. Van Dine wrote to a set of rules he published himself, and the Greene case is the one where the rules produce something genuinely cold. Fifty-two plates of painting, among them Whistler and Sickert, gather the river, the pier, the house and the crowd into the same muted weather the Greene family dies in.