The Red House Mystery (Pocket 81)

223 pp. The story is set in the quaint, English countryside at the house party of Mark Ablett, where a murder quickly takes place. Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a willful actress, and Bill Beverley, a young man about town. Mark's long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead, shot through the head. Mark Ablett has disappeared, so Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides to investigate. Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart's Doctor Watson; they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound.