The Abandoned Room
1917
The night Silas Blackburn dies, his great house sits in darkness and his young cousin Katherine keeps vigil by his bedside. The old man trembles with an inexplicable terror, his eyes fixed on something in the corner of the room that no one else can see. By morning, he is dead and the family has gathered, each member a suspect in a drama of inheritance and old resentments. Bobby Blackburn, the grandson with gambling debts and a precarious relationship to his grandfather's fortune, is the obvious candidate for suspicion, but Detective Howells soon discovers that the truth hides in deeper rooms than anyone imagined. Written in 1917, The Abandoned Room captures a moment when the detective novel was still young and dangerous, when authors could stack suspicion like kindling and let the reader's imagination do the rest. This is a locked-room puzzle wrapped in family tragedy, where every whispered conversation behind closed doors and every nervous glance across the dinner table builds toward a revelation that feels both surprising and inevitable. For readers who crave atmospheric puzzles where the setting itself seems to hold secrets, where a lonely estate becomes a character in the mystery.
