On the verge of a second marriage, a divorcee discovers her first husband has returned, and murder ensues in this chilling tale, which the New York Times Book Review hailed as “one of the most ingeniously constructed mystery stories John Dickson Carr has ever told” After divorcing her husband, Ned, Eve Neill falls in love with banker Toby Lawes and quickly agrees to marry him. But news of the engagement brings Ned back, intent on reclaiming his bride, whatever the cost. The price of passion proves too high when a dead body is found—and beside it, the shattered fragments of a snuff-box that once belonged to Napoleon. These fragments tell two tales, one true and one false. And in order for Eve to know whether her future holds a white bridal gown or a black hangman’s cloak, she will have to trust that an expert in criminology will be able to force the evidence to tell the truth and point out the real murderer.

Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946) won an Edgar Award for best first novel and continues to fascinate as a singular mixture of detection, satire, and psychological portraiture. A poet on the faculty of an Ivy League school is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and panic in the hot house atmosphere of an English department rife with talk of Freud and Kafka. This classic novel is one of eight works included in The Library of America's two-volume edition Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, edited by Sarah Weinman.

Jimmy Answell is summoned for an audience with Avory Hume. The two men are later discovered after witnesses break into Hume's study - a room with bolted steel shutters and a heavy door locked on the inside. Answell is found lying unconscious and Hume stabbed to death with an arrow. How can young Answell not be guilty? Sir Henry Merrivale investigates and reconstructs the crime in the courtroom.