The Ear in the Wall

A young woman vanishes while shopping in broad daylight, and no one can explain where she went. That's the puzzle that draws District Attorney Carton to the doorstep of Craig Kennedy, a scientist-detective who thinks faster than the police and trusts evidence over intuition. In 1910 New York, Betty Blackwell's disappearance is more than a missing persons case. It's a thread that unravels into political graft, urban vice, and the darker corners of a city racing toward modernity. Kennedy applies his laboratory mind to the streets, where memory proves treacherous, witnesses go silent, and the powerful have reasons to keep questions unanswered. The ear in the wall is watching. Someone always is. This is early detective fiction at its formative moment, when science was becoming the hero and the city itself was the villain. Reeve writes with purpose: to entertain, certainly, but also to expose what reformers saw as the rot beneath the era's glittering surface. The result is a page-turner that doubles as a time capsule of Progressive Era anxieties about women alone in the city, the limits of justice, and whether the system can ever really be trusted.