It had been so quickly done that he felt almost as if a little knife had actually flashed by him and stuck, quivering, in the door at his back. Violet Hunter disappears at dusk one evening on a lonely road not far from a mysterious sanatorium. Her body is found buried in her friend’s garden. Has Linda strangled her in a fit of jealousy? Or has the sanatorium’s sinister foreign doctor drawn her into his macabre experiments? The police seize the few clues and Linda Merle is accused of murder. Bit by bit they build up the circumstantial evidence while the ingenious private detective Hermann Glide works in the background. By methods of intuition and a daring lack of scruple, Glide solves the mystery of the crime—a crime of passion and tragically warped mentality.

Together they looked down at the inert sprawling figure of a man fantastically dressed in red-and-white-striped pyjama trousers, with a red sash belt and a white silk shirt open at the neck. A Christmas gathering of young and old in a great country house in England—a masquerade—and the lights are turned off for a game of hide and seek. Silence—then a man’s cry for “Lights!” The lights come on, revealing Hugh Darrow, blind since the War, standing in the main hall, fresh blood dripping from his hands and covering his white Pierrot costume. He tells the story of having discovered a dead man, stabbed through the heart, lying in a curtained window embrasure next to the one in which he was hiding. The murdered man proves to be Stallard, one of the visitors, and a writer of mystery tales. There follows a thrilling tale in which the life of an innocent man hangs in the balance. A grand and baffling tale for the mystery lover.

Murder in the poisoned bosom of a genteel, if alarmingly dysfunctional, family in the English countryside. Dennyford is a “peaceful little place . . . where the most exciting thing that could happen would be the lowering of somebody’s golf handicap...” Or so the locals used to think. But young Lucy Rivers is in love with handsome Mark Armour, the local police’s chief suspect in a most dreadful murder case – the initial slaying (that of Mark’s domineering older sister, Bertha), and another which follows it, appear to have been done by means of arsenic. The true killer is finally unmasked, with credit going to the wily Hermann Glide, working in parallel with Inspector Collier of Scotland Yard.