The Attorney General's wife is found dead inside a safe, and the man who discovered her is a burglar who came to steal. This is the extraordinary opening of Natalie Sumner Lincoln's 1912 mystery, a novel that wastes no time plunging readers into scandal, suspicion, and the brittle polite society of Washington D.C. at the turn of the century. As detectives sift through the wreckage of the Trevor household, they find a family fractured by secrets: the grief-stricken Attorney General, his daughter Beatrice navigating her own precarious position, and a circle of friends and servants whose alibis don't quite hold up to scrutiny. The safe that should have been secure becomes the scene of the century's most scandalous murder, and everyone who entered the Trevor home becomes a suspect. Lincoln writes with sharp precision about the dangerous games played in parlors and drawing rooms, where a well-placed word can destroy reputations and silence forever can be purchased. This is Golden Age mystery at its most addictive, when the rules of detection were still being invented and every clue feels genuinely vital. For readers who crave the claustrophobic intimacy of a closed-circle mystery, where the killer walks among the grieving, this novel delivers its pleasures with economical force.
