The Gold Bag

A rich man is shot in his study, a woman's gold-mesh bag lies by the desk, and the young detective who is quite certain he can read the evidence proceeds to build a case against nearly everybody. Wells lost most of her hearing to scarlet fever at six and turned out roughly a hundred and seventy books; she wrote detective stories by the rules she herself codified, and this early one is her cleanest puzzle. Fifty-four plates of American and European painting, from Eakins and Cropsey to van Gogh, bring the domestic interiors, river valleys and quiet rooms of the era into this tale of a crime in West Sedgwick.