Nero Wolfe again exposes a communist-murderer in a case both the FBI and the police try to keep hushed. Two female suspects smack it out in Wolfe’s office and one drunken woman pats him on the head after pouring scotch in his beer. The feds and cops try to raise hell when they learn that Wolfe offers to “bribe” a suspect.

The character of Beaky Durkin is not presented as being related in any way to Fred Durkin, a free-lance detective often hired by Wolfe to assist with cases.

Readers who have long followed the adventures of Nero Wolfe will surely agree not only that this is one of the neatest murder puzzles ever set down by Rex Stout, but also that it is the most exciting, adventure-filled, and breathless story he ever told.Nero Wolfe has represented some pretty unusual clients in his time, but in this one, his client — believe it or not — is the fast-talking, hard-hitting, skirt-chasing assistant and companion to Nero, Archie Goodwin himself.We’ll make three bets with you abut Prisoner’s Base: First — you won’t solve it. Second — you’ll agree that no author ever played more fair with his readers. Third — when you finish it, you will feel as if you have been on a forty-eight-hour, breath-taking, danger-filled chase up and down the avenues of New York, into some of Manhattan’s darkest and more terror-filled alleys.

Ptomaine poisoning killed the heiress. Now their client can cozy up to the money. But there are too many beautiful women in the mansion, and the slimy little parasite is confused when he should be scared. After Archie Goodwin drops the ball, Nero Wolfe is ready to break a few laws — like extortion.

A woman with a man seated beside her in a Cadillac mouths soundlessly to a street urchin, “Help, get a cop!” One of these three very presently is murdered, and as a result Nero Wolfe delivers himself of his first recorded lecture on crime detection. Even more surprising, Nero and Archie take on a case for the smallest retainer in their history: four dollars and thirty cents.“The Golden Spiders”, Rex Stout introduces a new kind of criminal engaged in a peculiarly contemporary and particularly vicious kind of crime. Nero never had to think faster and Archie never encountered greater perils than in this, undoubtedly one of the very finest novels of detection or our day.

Nero Wolfe can’t stand Leo Heller, a mathematician who uses operations research to solve mysteries and seems to be superseding Wolfe’s own reputation. But then Heller is murdered by one of his clients. He managed to leave a cryptic message that Wolfe eventually decodes, partly with the help of Lancelot Hogben Mathematics for the million.

When a Man Murders is about a man who is believed killed in the Korean War; his supposed widow marries another man; when her first husband turns up alive, and is then murdered, the second husband is a natural suspect, but it turns out the dead mam’s will had been tampered with.

The newest full-length Rex Stout novel provides not only a new experience for Nero Wolfe fans, but also a new experience for Nero himself.It’s one thing for Nero to move his hand across a glove and put his finger on a distant seat of murder; it’s quite another thing for him to move his ponderous body father than across a room. Yet, believe it or not, in The Black Mountain Nero not only leaves his house but he actually leaves the United States, crosses and ocean, a continent, and a sea, and — with Archie — penetrates, disguised, into one of the most dangerous and controversial places on earth.From there on it’s Nero Wolfe as Nero never was before: a Nero compelled to cope with sinister international plotters, to deal with an enemy to whom murder is but a trivial incident, to return to New York on one of the strangest missions in all detective fiction.

The Body in the Hall, involves a dog as the only witness to a murder.

The Last Witness involves an ingenious way of using a phone-answering service for a blackmail racket.

When Nero Wolfe comes up against murder in the advertising business it isn’t surprising that the world’s largest detective (one-seventh of a ton of orchid-loving, beer-drinking genius) should find himself involved with one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. The agency is conducting the biggest prize contest ever, with prizes totaling one million dollars. Just one man knows the solutions in the million-dollar contest, and it’s his disappearance that introduces Nero and Archie to the world of four-color spreads and TV spectaculars. It introduces them also to a murderer who has the audacity to kill in Nero’s office and before Nero’s very eyes. After Rex Stout unfolds this novel, it is possible that the advertising world will never be the same — and this may be a public service.

Nero Wolfe agreed to cook the Ambassador’s trout — not to catch the diplomat’s killer.

The great detective was baffled by a misfit piece in the puzzle of a millionaire’s murder.

The famous sleuth, involved in a wire-tapping investigation, finds himself prime suspect in the murder of a deceptive client.

In the newest full-length Nero Wolfe novel, crime ranges from embezzlement through murder to a great national scandal. At the outset, Nero and Archie undertake to find a man who has disappeared in New York — a man once accused of theft by his own father and now known to be innocent. Nero and Archie accomplish for the father what the Bureau of Missing Persons couldn’t: they locate the young man — but only to find him in ultimate peril. Meanwhile a national embezzlement on a heretofore unheard-of scale has attracted the interest of a Congressional committee. Nero, Archie, and various of Nero’s other assistants become deeply involved in both the peril and the scandal. Nero never had to think faster. Archie never had to act faster, than in this latest from the mystery master.

The guests had seemed full of good will — until their host was poisoned. Then the truth began to merge, and even Wolfe was baffled.

Leaving the church, Mrs. Bynoe seemed unaware of the cameras — and of danger.

NERO WOLFE, in this complete mystery novel, admired the knives displayed at the picnic until he found one in a corpse in the tent.

“I want you to get a snake out of my house. Out of my family.” Thus spoke millionaire Otis Jarrell, offering Nero Wolfe ten thousand dollars in cash as a retainer. If it hadn’t just happened that Jarrell called on Wolfe during a time when relations between the great detective and his faithful assistant Archie Goodwin were less cordial than usual, Archie, victim of Wolfe’s spite, would not have found himself posing as secretary to Jarrell. But it did so happen, and as a result Archie became part of the Jarrell menage in the twenty-room duplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Here he met the “snake” — Jarrell’s handsome, charming daughter-in-law — as well as an assortment of other ladies and gentlemen, including a pretty young girl who danced well and wrote poetry, a lazy brother-in-law who cheerfully lost other people’s money on horses, and an almost too efficient stenographer named Nora. When Archie found Jarrell’s former secretary face down on the floor, with a .38-bullet hole in back of his head, he knew indeed that there was a snake somewhere. The story of how he and Nero Wolfe identified and caught that reptile is herewith set down in Archie’s own lively words.

"Murder Is No Joke,” a workaday whodunit in a couturier’s salon, is a sample, par excellence, of the master’s inimitable ability to relate the unrelated — put the round peg in the square hole, so to speak — and nail two killings on one murderer.