This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
The Paradise Mystery is a twenty-seven-chapter detective novel by J. S. Fletcher, set in the old cathedral city of Wrychester. One morning a visitor to the town, a man who has registered at the Mitre Hotel under the name of John Braden, is found dead at the foot of the steep stone stair of the ancient enclosure called Paradise — and the inquest brings out a tangle of oddities: a purse with a cryptic memorandum about the tomb of one Richard Jenkins, a History of Barthorpe in the dead man's suitcase, and the quiet agitation of Dr. Mark Ransford, the respected resident who is guardian of two handsome young wards, Mary and Dick Bewery.
Bryce, a young man of independent means who has come to Wrychester to investigate the curious death, refuses to let the matter rest. Piece by piece he uncovers that Braden was in fact John Brake, a former bank manager who had been convicted of fraud ten years earlier and imprisoned — and that behind the old case stand two men who ruined him and let him take the blame. The trail leads from the parish registers of the village of Braden Medworth, where a marriage entry bears the names of John Brake, Mary Bewery and Mark Ransford as witness, to the Scotland Yard detective Jettison, the retired old detective Harker, and a shabby informer named Glassdale who knows the secret of the Wraye fortune.
As the truth emerges — that the dead man's death was an accident of the night, and that the real crime lies deeper in a poisoned witness and a shot in the dark — the mystery closes in on the handsome, sinister Mr. Folliot, and the story ends, as it began, with the old cathedral city settling its accounts and Ransford speaking at last to Mary.
