The Leavenworth Case
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
As one of the first writers of detective fiction in America, Anna Katharine Green has been called the "the mother of the detective novel." A bestselling author who would author almost forty novels, she is noted for introducing the first American series of detective novels. Her first novel, "The Leavenworth Case," which introduces us to her popular detective Ebenezer Gryce, is a classic whodunit concerning the murder of Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy New York merchant and philanthropist. Drawing upon the conventions of her contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the reader is presented with the perplexing fact that the victim is discovered in his locked Manhattan mansion, a stylistic device employed in a number of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Suspicion quickly falls upon Horatio's niece Eleanore, who stands to benefit through inheritance by her Uncle's untimely demise as well as the other members of the household. Mystery lovers will delight in this first novel of a series in which they may not yet be familiar with.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in 1878, nine years before the debut of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, this atmospheric and suspenseful mystery well deserves a modern audience. When someone shoots Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy retired merchant, through the head in his library late one night, the evidence at the inquest indicates that no one could have left the victim's locked Manhattan mansion before the discovery of the body the next morning. Suspicion thus falls on members of the household, specifically the dead man's nieces, Mary and Eleanore, only one of whom stands to benefit from their uncle's death. Everett Raymond, a junior partner in a New York law firm that had Leavenworth as a client, teams with unassuming official investigator Ebenezer Gryce to seek the truth. Green (1846 1935), whose smooth prose remains fresh, makes Gryce an interesting enough character to leave fans of traditional whodunits eager to see more of the detective in reissues of his further exploits.
