A lynch mob threatens to take over a small New England town after a shocking murder
Homicide has never had a place in Shinn Corners. This backwater New England hamlet has seen three unlawful deaths in its 250-year history: infanticide in 1739, a political killing in the 1860s, and a forgettable murder some 15 years ago. In his long tenure on the bench, Judge Lewis Shinn has hardly seen any violent crime at all. His nephew, Johnny, is happy to settle in such a quiet place. After fighting in the Korean and Second World Wars, he’s seen enough bloodshed to last a lifetime. On returning to Shinn Corners, however, he learns that death has followed him home.
When the town’s only celebrity, landscape painter Fanny Adams, is killed with a fireplace poker, suspicion falls on a foreign stranger who recently passed through. As mob rule threatens to corrupt the stranger’s trial, Johnny will fight for justice—and learn the chilling truth about his Yankee neighbors.
Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery. Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1928, when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who uses his spare time to assist his police inspector uncle in solving baffling crimes. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired Queen upon Lee’s death.