This Week’s Subscriber Giveaway: A Vivid Press Edition of Genre Classic ‘The Circular Staircase, by Mary Roberts Rinehard

The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehard
A Vivid Press Edition

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Welcome to another LGBTSr subscriber giveaway!

This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous.

So begins one of the most entertaining and shrewdly constructed mysteries in American fiction.

Rachel Innes has no intention of playing detective. She simply wants a quiet summer at Sunnyside, a sprawling country house rented while its owners are away in California. But the first night brings strange sounds on the staircase. By the third, the servants have fled. And by the fourth, there is a dead man at the bottom of the circular staircase — a man her niece and nephew knew all too well.

What follows is murder, a vanished nephew, a bankrupt bank, hidden rooms, buried secrets, and a house that refuses to surrender its dead. Through it all, Rachel Innes — sharp-tongued, clear-eyed, and utterly unwilling to be frightened off her own lease — refuses to leave until she knows the truth.

First published in 1908, The Circular Staircase launched Mary Roberts Rinehart to national fame and sold over a million copies. It pioneered the “Had-I-But-Known” school of mystery writing, inspired the Broadway sensation The Bat, and gave Bob Kane one of the early sparks for Batman. At the peak of her popularity, Rinehart was more widely read than Agatha Christie.

She deserves to be read again.

A Vivid Press Annotated Edition of a Genre Classic vividpress.com