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3.5 

The Haunted Lady

By Mary Roberts Rinehart
The Haunted Lady by Mary Roberts Rinehart digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A dowager is being scared to death in this classic whodunit by a #1 New York Times–bestselling master who “helped the mystery series grow up” (The New York Times).
 
It’s enough to stop Eliza Fairbanks’s heart. At least that’s what the elderly widow claims is being done to her. First, someone unleashes a cloud of bats in her locked bedroom. When that doesn’t do the trick, next comes a pack of rats to claw at her toes. Special duty nurse Hilda Adams, aka “Miss Pinkerton” to the Homicide Bureau, believes Eliza’s every rattled fear is true. She may be frail—but she’s not batty.
 
What Eliza is, is very, very rich. Out of the shady and oddball assortment of relatives swarming the mansion, someone clearly has an eye on the Fairbanks fortune. Now it’s Hilda’s job to keep an eye on Eliza before a potential killer resorts to more definitive means. And considering all the bad blood running through the heart of the Fairbanks family, it might already be too late to save her charge.
 

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18 Reviews

3.5
“I was rather disappointed with this one. I had enjoyed the first two Hilda Adams mysteries I had read -- "Locked Doors" & "Miss Pinkerton", but this one was very different. First of all, it was no longer written in the first person style... a change I found very jarring. It almost felt like the book was written by a different author. This sensation was intensified by the fact that the Inspector had a different name (1st Inspector was Patton, the 2nd was Fuller), but his relationship with Hilda Adams seemed to be the same as that of the previous of Inspector with her. I found it distracting, since I couldn't quite figure out if it was the same man or a different one… or if Rinehart randomly forgot her Inspector’s name, simultaneously forgetting that she could look it up in her previous works. Sadly, Fuller felt like a weak imitation of Patton, who I liked a lot better. Finally, there was no sense of suspense. In the first two mysteries I read, sometimes Hilda would say things like "If only I knew how I would regret that later". This is not something I like in mysteries, but it worked in a first person account. It seemed like she was writing a journal or talking directly to the reader as things came to her mind. "The Haunted Lady" took this to a whole other level. Hilda would reference characters being killed before it happened, several times, completely killing the suspense. It was hard to get into what the characters were feeling when the narrative kept undercutting its own suspense. The head-hopping kind of annoyed me too; the author would at times change points of view randomly, which I found jarring and distracting. I much preferred her previous first-person style. If the author had stayed with the first-person style and with Inspector Patton, I probably would have enjoyed this book a lot more. There was a lot of potential here that was not taken full advantage of. If the next novel is anything like this one, I probably will not be reading it. So disappointing.”

About Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) was one of the United States’s most popular early mystery authors. Born in Pittsburgh to a clerk at a sewing machine agency, Rinehart trained as a nurse and married a doctor after her graduation from nursing school. She wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her young husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909), established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn’t long before she was one of the nation’s most popular mystery novelists.

Among her dozens of novels are The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911), which began a six-book series, and The Bat (originally published in 1920 as a play), which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane’s Batman. Credited with inventing the phrase “The butler did it,” Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she began writing much earlier than Christie, and was much more popular during her heyday. 

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