Private investigator Ellery Queen runs into an old school friend in a Trenton bar. Lawyer Bill Angell is on his way to visit his brother-in-law, Joe Wilson, at a shack by the Delaware river. Bill arrives to find his brother-in-law dying from a stab wound, with just enough breath to accuse a veiled lady of his murder. It's a good thing that Bill has run into his old friend, Ellery, since he may be the only person who can sift through the details to correctly identify the killer.

The Ellery Queen mysteries play fair with readers. There is a characteristic pause in the story when all of the clues have been presented and it's possible for readers to piece them together to reach the same conclusion as Ellery. In this book, that point came when there were still two discs/segments left in the audio version. With nearly an hour left in the audio version, all of the characters knew the murderer's identity. However, Ellery continued to refer to the murderer as “the criminal” for quite some time yet. To say this was irritating would be an understatement. Ellery Queen's mysteries make a refreshing change from heavier reads, but they have enough idiosyncrasies to deter me from binge reading the series. ( )

My favorite moment in this story occurs early on --a man leading a double life has been murdered; his snobbish wealthy wife is being very contemptuous of what she assumes to be his lowlife mistress in his the life --when it turns out that he had married the "lowlife" woman first, so the snob is in fact the one who has no rightful claim to be his wife. Queen sys early on that the question is, which of the two men did the murderer think he/she was killing, but if I recall right, the answer is "both" ( )

Good start to the Second Period novels. ( )

Cleverly crafted murder mystery first published in 1936 by Frederic Dannay and Manfred B, Lee, under the pen name Ellery Queen. Queen, of course, is the detective solving the mystery of a body found in a house where it’s obvious no one lived. Half way between NYC and Philadelphia Pennsylvania, the house was a place for the murder victim, who led a double life, to switch identities.

I had an inkling of who the murderer was this time, but based only on one fact, and no clues. These guys were good.

Read this if: you love a classic murder mystery; or you want a small taste of NYC society in the 1930s. 3½ stars ( )