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

The Egyptian Cross Mystery has been characterized as “Ellery Queen’s weirdest adventure.”

The shuddery, breathless plot plus Ellery Queen’s brilliantly logical solution mark the peak of Mr. Queen’s new famous “analytico-deductive” method.

Ellery Queen has pitted his brain against many murdered but nowhere in his career has be applied his diamond-keen with to a murder as eerie and as puzzling as the crime which open The Egyptian Cross Mystery.

She was twenty-two years old, a Smith graduate, charming, intelligent, appealing. When she buttonholed Archie Goodwin, she had a very simple request. She hadn’t the faintest idea who her father was, had never seen him or heard of him, and wanted In learn who and where he was. She also, it turned out, had something in excess of a quarter of a million dollars mysteriously received from that father, but she didn’t really consider that part of the mystery at all. Archie, of course, took the problem to Nero and Nero took the problem on after he discovered that the girl’s mother had apparently been murdered and that the possible antecedents of the girl stretched back toward certain men of great power and influence, and into realms as diverse as international banking, national television, and public relations. To solve it, Nero and Archie have to be at the top of their form, and they are. This is the first new Nero Wolfe novel in nearly two years — an unusual interval for the productive Rex Stout, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in December 1966.

Chances are you are already a Nero Wolfe fan before you hold this new volume in your hands. We need not repeat to connoisseurs of the civilized — although not unbloody — chronicles of crime that the sedentary orchid-fancier and his leg-man Archie are the veritable Beluga in the field of mayhem and murder stories.

For many years the redoubtable twosome has been involved with dark deeds of many kinds, but in The Final Deduction they for the first time tangle with the deepest-hued of all — kidnaping combined with the murder which so often accompanies it. The problem — and the fee — are worthy of Nero’s genius and Archie’s footwork. The facts are not concealed, and we invite you to see if you can arrive at “the final deduction” by the time it is revealed on the last pages of this top-drawer exercise in entertainment and detection.

When she found the body of her beloved Uncle Jonathan, Georgina stooped to pick up the revolver, thus becoming the prime suspect. But there was also the missing fingerprint – the showpiece of Uncle Jonathan's collection, apparently acquired from a self-confessed murderer, who was still at large.

Enoch Arnold Bennett (always known as Arnold Bennett) was one of the most remarkable literary figures of his time, a product of the English Potteries that he made famous as the Five Towns. Yet he could hardly wait to escape his home town, and he did so by the sheer force of his ambition to succeed as an author. In his time he turned his hand to every kind of writing, but he will be remembered for such novels as The Old Wives' Tale, the Clayhanger trilogy (Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, and These Twain), and The Card. He also wrote such intriguing self-improvement books as Literary Taste, How To Live on 24 Hours a Day, The Human Machine, etc.

Test your own powers of deduction alongside those of the most celebrated detective ever to walk the streets of London or grace the pages of a book. Sherlock Holmes brings his extraordinary insight and intriguing quirks to every case he is called upon to solve — sometimes without even leaving the comfort of his Baker Street apartment. In this collection of 23 ingeniously plotted stories, no case is too big, too small, or too bizarre for Holmes. Whether he is foiling the grand schemes of a would-be bank robber or uncovering family secrets kept hidden away for years, Sherlock Holmes at all times proves himself a formidable adversary. With his trusted and always-admiring friend, Dr. Watson, at his side, “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has ever seen” uses his unique analytical gifts to confound every criminal and unravel every mystery.

A STATEMENT TO THE PUBLIC

Since 1929 we have the exclusive privilege of publishing the detective stories of Ellery Queen in the United States. In our years publishing Queen’s thirteen books we have refrained from the usual and monotonously extravagant publishers’ claims, preferring to let the books speak for themselves.

They have spoken so eloquently — each has been an instant best-seller here and abroad — that Queen is now recognized by the world’s press and public as one of the greatest writers of detective stories.

Now, with our publication of Ellery Queen’s fourteenth book and latest novel, THE FOUR OF HEARTS, we feel compelled to break our silence. We honestly believe that THE FOUR OF HEARTS is not only Ellery Queen’s finest novel to date, but is destined to be ranked as a classic by those familiar with this type of fiction.

We ask you to compare it mercilessly, point for point — in plot, in characterization, in atmosphere, in style, in ingenuity, in excitement and bafflement and as a source of sheer reading pleasure — with any detective story you have ever read.

We ask you to judge for yourself whether our claim is even slightly overmagnified. We feel confident that your judgement will substantiate our opinion.

Dane McKell, millionaire socialite, was planning an exhilarating summer when he discovered to his horror that his father was having an affair with another woman. The McKells were not only very, very rich, they were also very, very respectable, and Dane’s mother was a gentle and lovely lady.Dane forced a meeting with the woman in the case with the full intent of breaking up his father’s relationship. Then, helplessly, he himself fell in love with her. After that — murder.This is the basic situation, a brilliantly plotted detective story that only the old master, Queen, could devise, and that only Ellery, working with his father, Inspector Queen, could solve.As always with classic Queens, the reader will have it solved three times before he discovers that he has been outwitted as usual.

Marion Sharpe and her mother seem an unlikely duo to be found on the wrong side of the law. Quiet and ordinary, they have led a peaceful and unremarkable life at their country home, The Franchise. Unremarkable that is, until the police turn up with a demure young woman on their doorstep. Not only does Betty Kane accuse them of kidnap and abuse, she can back up her claim with a detailed description of the attic room in which she was kept, right down to the crack in its round window. But there's something about Betty Kane's story that doesn't quite add up. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is stumped. It takes Robert Blair, solicitor turned amateur detective, to solve the mystery that lies at the heart of The Franchise Affair.

Holmes and Watson take to the skies in the quest of the nefarious Von Bork and his weapon of dread... A night sky aerial engagement with the deadly Fokker nearly claims three brilliant lives... And an historicalliance is formed, whereby Baker Street's enigmatic mystery-solver and Greystoke, the noble savage, peer of the realm and lord of the jungle, team up to bring down the hellish hun Thisedition also contains a brand new afterword by Win Scott Eckert and a bonus preview of the new Kim Newman novel, Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles.

A woman suffers amnesia as she regains consciousness to find herself standing on cellar steps with a dead girl down below. As she flees she runs into Miss Silver, who takes on this most mysterious case.

Uncle Slater O’Shea was loaded.

Uncle Slater was supporting the lot of them — five freeloaders.

And in spite of liberal daily applications of whisky, Uncle Slater had his health.

He intended to keep it, so he had made a new will. So long as he continued to enjoy life, he would continue to maintain them. But the minute he died, his estate would be cut up among them, plus seventeen additional assorted O’Sheas. Cut up into twenty-two pieces, the freeloaders wouldn’t get enough from Uncle Slater O’Shea’s estate to live in the manner to which they had become accustomed.

Several weeks later, benevolently trailing a fragrant haze of good Irish whisky behind him, Uncle Slater went upstairs for a nip and a nap. He never came down. Which of them had been foolish enough to do the old boy in?

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.