Chicago in the 1930s: a wealthy English widow walks into police headquarters and asks what it would cost to report a murder before it happened — her own; Mrs. Cynthia Wakeham has taken a house on Lake Shore Drive and surrounded herself with a nephew drowning in gambling debts, an English cousin who quotes Scripture, a private secretary, a spiritualist, a busted lord, and two society girls sniffing around the fortune, and now she has sent an engraved invitation to Veronica Lakewood and Captain Hastings reading "I dislike mysteries but I collect witnesses"; because Cynthia and Veronica share a Paris past built on money, silence, and a woman named Lucienne whom Veronica tried to save and Cynthia chose to forget; when a guest is murdered during the dinner party and a forged photograph surfaces that could destroy everything Veronica has built, what began as a rich woman's theatre becomes a locked-house mystery about old debts, new lies, and the dangerous question of what a fortune has actually bought; inspired by Anna Katharine Green's novel while remaining entirely original, Cynthia Wakeham's Money is an original Golden Age–style mystery about money, masks, and the discovery that the most expensive thing a fortune can purchase is the right to pretend nothing happened.