The Golden Slipper

By night Violet Strange glitters through New York's most exclusive ballrooms — a petite, fashionable debutante no one would ever take seriously, which is exactly what makes her so dangerous, for in secret she is a paid investigator hired for the cases the police cannot touch; her new problem is a delicious one: a string of jewels keeps vanishing at society receptions, corals and diamonds and a sapphire pendant that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, the thefts trailing the same handsome family of girls from house to house until cruel suspicion settles on one innocent daughter, and to catch the real thief Violet must set a trap baited with a single golden slipper; this is the work of the woman who came before Sherlock Holmes — Anna Katharine Green, often called the mother of the detective novel, who was writing best-sellers a decade before Conan Doyle reached Baker Street and whom both Doyle and Agatha Christie openly admired — from The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Anna Katharine Green wrote it more than a century ago, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.