The Grotto Spectre

For the first time in her life Violet Strange takes a case not for money but for a face — across a crowded musicale she sees a young man marked by a sorrow so deep it stops her heart mid-beat, Roger Upjohn, heir to an old Massachusetts family and the most whispered-about name in society, whose beautiful cold-hearted wife was found dead in her bed of heart failure, the doctors said, though the bruises blackening her wrists told another story and the gossip never stopped; now Roger comes to Violet with a confession, a plea, and a secret hidden in the rocks along his family's coast — an old grotto fitted for gambling and ruin, and now said to be haunted by a spectre no one can explain — and to clear an innocent man she must go where the police never looked, into the grotto and into a grief long mistaken for guilt; this is the work of Anna Katharine Green, the American novelist often called the mother of the detective novel who was writing best-sellers a decade before Sherlock Holmes, and her most beguiling creation the society debutante no one suspects, 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.