Unseen Ear

The murder happens inches away, and she hears nothing. Judith Richards is stone deaf, seated alone in her father's library at midnight when an intruder breaks in, cracks the safe, and is examining his loot when a steel blade shoots through the portières and kills him. Judith never turns around. She never hears a sound. When she finally rises to leave, she finds a dead man at her feet, and recognizes him as the stepson of her uncle. Detective Ferguson arrives at the sprawling household and immediately recognizes the impossibility: the killer was inside, known to the victim, and struck while a witness sat merely feet away, except that witness might as well have been on another continent. Every family member had motive, every alibi crumbles under scrutiny. The killer counted on Judith's silence, but they didn't count on Ferguson understanding that deafness is not the same as invisibility. Natalie Sumner Lincoln's 1921 mystery places a deaf woman at the center of a perfectly constructed crime, then watches it all unravel through the one sense the killer forgot: sight.