The Clevedon Case

Dennis Holt, a respected criminologist, expects peace when he inherits a house in the remote village of Cartordale. Nothing ever happens here, he tells himself. Then, at precisely 11:53 on a fog-choked night, someone taps at his window. A young girl pushes through the sash, bleeding and terrified: "Let me in! I have hurt myself." She is Kitty Clevedon, and her arrival plunges Holt into the murder of Sir Philip Clevedon at nearby White Towers. As he investigates, the details multiply bewilderingly - suspicious servants, household secrets, a woman whose vulnerability might be performance. Holt's methodical mind must reconstruct what truly happened that night, even as the mystery threatens to ensnare him. The novel builds to a carefully reasoned revelation, the kind that Golden Age readers treasured: a puzzle solved through patience and logic, not violence.