•‘No living story-teller handles a mysterious crime more cleverly than J.S. Fletcher’ THE TIMES. •First republication in the USA for almost a century. •J.S. Fletcher was a best-selling detective story novelist of the ‘Golden Age of Crime’. •By the author of THE MIDDLE TEMPLE MURDER, 134 Amazon.com reviews, averaging 4.5 stars. Whilst touring the North of England in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, Salim Mazaroff and Mervyn Holt depart from the Great North Road at Marrasdale Moor and reach a solitary inn. Mazaroff mysteriously disappears while walking the moors alone. His dead body is discovered in Reiver’s Den. Was it an accident, or was it murder? Where is the victim’s money, rings and tie-pin? Who killed Salim Mazaroff? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joseph Smith Fletcher was a highly successful English novelist of the early twentieth-century and Yorkshire’s most prolific author. An almost exact contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, he went on to become one of the leading exponents of crime-writing’s ‘Golden Age’. Among the characters he created were the clerical detective Reverend Francis Leggatt, vicar of Meddersly, the young newspaperman detective Frank Spargo and most famously of all, Ronald Camberwell, private investigator, who stared in an eleven book series. He rose top prominence for his crime novel THE MIDDLE TEMPLE MURDER (‘One of the most enjoyable crime novels of its period… skilfully constructed’ MARTIN EDWARDS) and due to President Woodrow Wilson’s publicly-proclaimed admiration for his work. A native Yorkshireman, he also wrote extensively on the history and landscape of the northern England county, work for which he was made Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His regional writing led him to being called ‘the Yorkshire Hardy’. He died in 1935. PRAISE FOR J.S. FLETCHER ‘No living story-teller handles a mysterious crime more cleverly than J.S. Fletcher’ THE TIMES ‘My favourite mystery writer’ PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON ‘J.S. Fletcher is one of the cleverest spinners of a detective yarn’ THE SCOTSMAN ‘J. S. Fletcher’s unravelling of a murder plot keeps the reader guessing all the time’ EVENING STANDARD