The Detections of Dr. Sam Johnson
ByPublisher Description
In 1775, as the British Empire is about to be cracked by the earthquake of the American Revolution, twenty English families join in the ghoulish bargain known as a tontine. Each puts £5,000 into a common fund to be held in trust for their children with the terrible stipulation that the money will go to the last child left alive. Such a bargain should take seventy or eighty years to come to fruition, but there is a curse upon this tontine. Sixteen of the twenty children are dead within four years—and the survivors have no one to turn to but the great Dr. Sam Johnson.
The seventy-year-old scholar has seen his share of trickery, corruption, and murder, but he's never encountered anything quite as chilling as "The Tontine Curse." In this story, and the seven others included in this volume, Dr. Johnson and his assistant, biographer James Boswell, pit their wits against the darkest mysteries of the Enlightenment.
In this charming, brilliant series, author Lillian de la Torre features Johnson and Boswell, real-life forerunners of Holmes and Watson, in an assortment of "excellent detective puzzles" (
).
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About Lillian de la Torre
Lillian de la Torre (1902–1993) was born in New York City. She received a bachelor's degree from the College of New Rochelle and master's degrees from Columbia University and Radcliffe College, and she taught in the English department at Colorado College for twenty-seven years. De la Torre wrote numerous books; short stories for
; reviews for the
; poetry; and plays, including one produced for Alfred Hitchcock's television series. In her first book,
(1945), she refuted twelve theories on the disappearance of a maidservant near the Tower of London in 1753, and then offered her own answer. Her series of historical detective stories about Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell comprise her most popular fiction. De la Torre served as the 1979 president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Other books by Lillian de la Torre
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