The novel that invented the "Had-I-But-Known" mystery — funny, frightening, and narrated by one of the great voices in American crime fiction.
Rachel Innes is a sensible Pittsburgh spinster who takes a country house for the summer to give her niece and nephew somewhere to be. Within forty-eight hours Sunnyside is besieged by noises in the night, objects that will not stay where they were left, and a body at the foot of the circular staircase.
What follows over three weeks involves a missing bank cashier, a secret passage, a great many locked doors, and one of the most satisfying drawing-room revelations in early American mystery.
Mary Roberts Rinehart was thirty-two, a doctor's wife and the mother of three small boys, when she wrote it. It made her a bestseller and eventually the highest-paid woman writer in America. It also founded a genre: every domestic suspense novel with an intelligent woman narrating her own unfolding obliviousness descends from Rachel Innes.
The form belongs to the voice. The whole book is Rachel talking — dry, self-deprecating, forever announcing that had she but known what was coming she would have behaved quite differently. On the page that is a device. Read aloud it is simply a woman telling you what happened to her that summer.
Narrated by Rebecca Kross, with a new foreword by Alexander Kross.
