Locked Doors by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Fans of Rinehart's nurse-detective Hilda Adams will not be disappointed in this mystery, filled with Gothic tension and suspense.

Working undercover for Inspector Patton on cases where the police cannot get close, she is presented with an odd assignment. The Reed household has lost their nurse after she went to pieces in just four days, refusing to return. The staff have all been dismissed, and there are rumours the governess disappeared, but never left.

There is no need for a doctor—it is only the two young boys who need attending. She finds the distressed couple in a gloomy townhouse, empty of furniture, all the rugs torn up, which shares an inner courtyard where ghostly shadows have been seen lurking in the night. She observes the strange behavior of the parents who sleep in a cot at the top of the stairs. The cries of the missing dog can still be heard, the goldfish have been poisoned, the phone lines cut, and most strange: all doors in the house are kept locked—including the bedrooms from the outside. Escaping to search the house in the night, she is frightened by seeing a disembodied head and hearing strange voices in the attic: "I die! Tomorrow I die!"

Something is terribly wrong —and then she finds the basement door unlocked.

This has terrific tension and a mystifying plot. Hard to believe it was written in 1914. Nurse Hilda Adams previously appeared in the story The Buckled Bag (1914), and returned in the ever-popular Miss Pinkerton (1932), The Haunted Lady (1942), and The Episode of the Wandering Knife (1950). Called the American Agatha Christie, Rinehart's earliest titles remain her most popular: The Circular Staircase (1908), The Man in Lower Ten (1909), and The Bat (1926). Her title The Door (1930) is credited with producing the phrase "The Butler did it!"

This and her other exciting classics can be found free online, or available as ebooks.

1914 / Paperback