Called to an urgent meeting at a mysterious shack in the middle of nowhere, attorney Bill Angell finds his brother-in-law, traveling salesman Joe Wilson, stabbed. With Joe's dying breath, he manages to convey that his murderer was a veiled woman. Was it the wild-eyed woman who had sped past Bill on his way up the dark road to the shack? To help him unravel the mystery, Bill calls on his old friend Ellery Queen. But first Queen will have to unravel the victim's double life - starting with the shack where he's been found dead, smack dab between two very different worlds.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

When a popular singer goes from retired to dead the day before New Year's Eve, Ellery Queen is certain it's murder. Luckily, just before she died, the victim managed to scribble out a single mysterious word: F A C E. Unfortunately, no one knows what it means. With the help of a new acquaintance, Inspector Harry Burke from Scotland, Queen uncovers even more baffling clues written in invisible ink. Enter the beautiful, discarded conquests of the dead singer's playboy husband, who prove a dangerous distraction for both Queen and Burke. Will erotic temptation derail the investigation? If it does, hearts will be broken, and what's worse -- someone will get away with murder.

The "intensely logical" master sleuth discovers a crowded coffin in one of his earliest and most puzzling cases (The New York Times). The scion of a famous New York art-dealing family, Georg Khalkis spent his final years housebound with blindness until he died of a heart attack. After his funeral, his will mysteriously vanishes. Following a thorough search, Inspector Richard Queen's son, Ellery, suggests checking the coffin, where they discover not one, but two corpses. When the second body is identified as an ex-convict, it becomes clear they have a murder case on their hands with links to the art world and a da Vinci forgery. It's up to young Ellery Queen to solve the case in "a lively and well-constructed yarn containing unusual setting, ingenuity of plot, a surprise solution and legitimate use of the analytico-deductive method" (New York Herald Tribune Book Review).

This is a new release of the original 1944 edition.

The Mystery Fancier, Volume 10 Number 3, Summer 1988, contains: "Ellery Queen, Sports Fan," by Joe R. Christopher, "The Gold Medal Boys," "Further Gems from the Literature," by William F. Deeck, "An Australian Bibliomystery," by Michael J. Tolley, "Reel Murders," by Walter Albert, "Mystery Mosts," by Jeff Banks and "The Backward Reviewer," by William F. Deeck.