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Audiobooks by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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Mary Roberts Rinehart, known for her bestselling mystery novels such as The Circular Staircase published in 1907, earned a reputation as “the American Agatha Christie” through the success of her novels. Yet Rinehart was also a WWI correspondent.
After convincing her editor at The Saturday Evening Post to send her to the Belgian front, and armed with letters of introduction, her status as a well-known writer and member of the American Red Cross, as well as plenty of fearless initiative, she became the first American to report from the front. In Kings, Queens and Pawns (1915) Rinehart records scenes of life at, and far from, the front: a baby whose legs were blown off, a young soldier rendered blind in battle sitting quietly as he listens to a recording of Madama Butterfly, the entire noncombatant population of a Belgian town homeless after relentless German-lead bombings, a queen overseeing her Needlework Guild.
Anticipating the ultimately widely held view of the bloody and often futile conflict, Rinehart argues that the greatest treasures of the warring countries, the young soldiers fighting so valiantly in the prime of their lives, are mere pawns wasted and lost on the desolate battlefields.
The Circular Staircase is a mystery novel by American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart. The story follows dowager Rachel Innes as she thwarts a series of strange crimes at a summer house she has rented with her niece and nephew.
An older woman of the elite class has lots of money and abundant courage and determination. Miss Cornelia Van Gorder wants some adventure in her life, so she rents a large mansion to see what she can stir up. She moves in with her niece and an unpredictable Irish maid and is confronted by an embezzlement problem at the owner’s bank. But that’s just the beginning of troubles, because a murderous masked criminal known as the Bat is using the mansion as a hideout.
All this becomes more than a mere summer vacation for Miss Cornelia during a stormy night when she more or less stumbles across a corpse, an apparent victim of the deadly Bat. In addition, her niece’s boyfriend is considered a suspect in the bank embezzlement case.
This literary combination of events had actually begun as a play that evolved into novel form conceived by noted author Mary Roberts Rinehart. Her credentials for conceiving such a mystery with murderous mayhem resulted in her often being called “America’s Agatha Christie.”
Let’s listen now to a story that contains some comedy in addition to its dire circumstances.
Rachel Innes, a middle-aged spinster, has barely settled in at the country house she has rented for the summer when a series of bizarre and violent events threaten to perturb her normally unflappable nature. A strange figure appears briefly in the twilight outside a window. At night, a rattling, metallic sound reverberates through dark halls, and-most disconcerting of all-the body of a strange man is found lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of a circular staircase.
Before this spine-tingling tale ends, five connected deaths shatter the normally placid atmosphere of the vacation retreat. Rachel's devoted niece and nephew are among the prime suspects in one of the murders; stolen securities and a bank default threaten the young pair's financial security, and Aunt "Ray" ultimately fights for her life in an airless secret room.
There's been an awful murder at Elizabeth Bell's otherwise quiet household in this classic mystery from the author of The Yellow Room.
Elizabeth Bell runs a quiet household, with no family and no more than the usual number of servants. She passes her time thinking about crime and working on her biography of a relative. When a young cousin comes to stay, life in the house becomes uncharacteristically lively. First, cousin Judy burns a hole in Miss Bell's desk. Next, they spy a burglar on the staircase-a shadowy figure who vanishes without a trace. And finally, Sarah, the nurse, takes the dogs for a walk and never returns.
She is found savagely murdered, and she will not be the last to die. At first, Miss Bell stays calm, but when the police determine that the killer was one of her household, she begins to panic. If one of her servants is the killer, what is an old woman to do?
In an elaborate house known as the Cloisters, Maud Wainwright rules supreme. The queen of society in the small town of Beverly, she has a table long enough to seat one hundred, and she keeps an iron grip on the guest list. Her right-hand woman is Pat Abbott, a local girl who is beautiful, innocent, and kind. Pat has no idea how cutthroat high society can be, but she's about to get a deadly first lesson.
Pat has fallen head over heels in love with Maud's son, Tony, a clever young rake with a single flaw: his vicious, gold-digging wife. At the same time that she is dangerously infatuated with a married man, Pat's world is turned upside down by a series of attacks on the estate-and a truly shocking murder. To save Tony and Maud, Pat must find the killer. But the list of suspects is as long as one of Maud's guest lists: When a woman has room at her table for one hundred friends, she'll have more than her share of enemies.
'Anyone who aspires to become a writer,' said the New York Times, 'could not do better than to study carefully the methods of Mary Roberts Rinehart.' The Great Mistake is a classic example of the golden age murder mystery at its best.
Two reclusive sisters. A crumbling mansion. A dead doppelgänger. The New York Times bestseller from the author known as the American Agatha Christie.
The Birches was one of the grand mansions of the 1920s, with a ballroom, tennis courts, and, of course, a swimming pool. But after the crash of '29, when Lois and Judith's father killed himself to escape his debts, the family turned the summer home into a fulltime retreat from the world. Decades later, Judith is the queen of New York society, a fast-living beauty whose nerves are beginning to fray, while Lois still lives in the dilapidated old mansion, writing mystery novels to pay the bills. She is about to encounter a mystery of her own.
To stave off a nervous breakdown, Judith moves in with her kid sister. Terrified of an unnamed threat, she nails her windows shut and locks the door. Soon, a woman is found dead in the pool-a stranger who bears a shocking resemblance to Judith. In a family with a history of tragedy, a chilling new chapter is about to be written.
A killer has an axe to grind in this classic whodunit from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Circular Staircase and mystery-writing pioneer.
Crescent Place was once a peaceful country green surrounded by five tasteful suburban houses and populated by polite, responsible citizens. But as the city enveloped it, the residents built a gate to keep the world out. With each passing year, the subdivision grew stranger and stranger-until it began to look like a time capsule of the 1890s. In these houses are a husband and wife who fight constantly, and another couple who hasn't spoken to each other in two decades. There is a widow in permanent mourning and a daughter whom the newspapers call psychotic. And there is a bedridden old woman who is about to be killed with an axe.
When her murder shatters the quiet of the little enclave, the tabloids delight in trumpeting the neighborhood's peculiarities. But as the search for the killer intensifies, the area's strangest secrets have yet to be revealed.
An isolated country house sets the scene for a wartime mystery from the #1 New York Times bestselling author known as the American Agatha Christie.
As far as Carol Spencer is concerned, the war has spoiled everything. She and Don had been engaged for years and were on the verge of marriage when he was shot down in the South Pacific, leaving Carol on the verge of spinsterhood at twenty-four. She wants to take some kind of job in the war effort, but her invalid mother demands that Carol accompany her to the family's summer home in Maine. But when they arrive at the faded mansion, they find it completely locked up. The servants are gone, the lights are dark-and there is a body in the closet.
There is a killer on the grounds of the abandoned Spencer estate, and the police believe it is Carol. As war rages across the seas, Carol Spencer fights a private battle of her own-to prove her own innocence, and to save her mother's life.
Murder visits a seaside mansion in this gothic mystery from the #1 New York Times bestselling author known as the American Agatha Christie.
The house called Sunset has been Marcia's summer home for her entire life. Both of her parents died there, and she and her brother spent their youth exploring its rambling hallways and seaside grounds. They love the old house, but Marcia's sister-in-law has never taken to it. Juliette loathes the sea, and soon comes to loathe her husband, as well. After they divorce, Juliette pays a final visit to Sunset, demanding alimony. She is there for a few tense days before she disappears. It takes them a week to find her body.
The peace at Sunset has been shattered, and Marcia must work quickly to keep her beloved childhood home from being forever spoiled. Somewhere in the creaky old mansion, a murderer lurks. Will Marcia be accused of the crime? Or will she be the next victim?
Rachel Innes is a rich lady who has been taking care of her niece and nephew since their father died. The three of them decide to rent a house in the country and although everything seems to be alright in the beginning, strange events soon begin to occur. Her niece disappears then reappears a few days later. There is a murder they are involved in. They hear strange noises. Things fall down the stairs in the middle of the night. Will Rachel solve the mysteries and how will their summer end? Find out in 'The Circular Staircase'.
B. J. Harrison started his Classic Tales Podcast back in 2007, wanting to breathe new life into classic stories. He masterfully plays with a wide array of voices and accents and has since then produced over 500 audiobooks. Now in collaboration with SAGA Egmont, his engaging narration of these famous classics is available to readers everywhere.
Mary Roberts Rinehart was an American writer who lived in the period 1876-1958. She wrote hundreds of short stories, novels and travelogues. She gained wide popularity with her detective stories and although her first mystery novel was published 12 years before Agatha Christie’s, Rinehart was often called the American Agatha Christie. Mary Rinehart is considered to have invented the 'Had I but known' way of mystery writing, which she used for the first time in her bestselling story 'The Circular Staircase'.
Where There's a Will is Mary Roberts Rinehart's hilarious comedy involving a health spa, an heir, a would-be princess, and an impostor. The story is told by Minnie, who has essentially run the spa for years and inherited the care of its famous spring from her father. When the old doctor dies and leaves the Hope Springs Spa to his near-do-well grandson with the stipulation that he live on premises for two months in order to inherit, the grandson is nowhere to be found. So Minnie tries to save the spa by enlisting the help of family and friends to trick the lawyer and keep the spa running.
