The Answerths live in extreme isolation in a lonely house surrounded by a moat. Bony becomes interested in the case when Mrs. Answerth is found strangled in the moat. Inspector Stanley was unable to solve the previous similar death of the local butcher, Ed Carlow. Mary Answerth is a tartar, a rough, tough woman who reckons there isn't a man or horse she can't master. Her sister ]anet is smooth and educated, speaking sweetly and with a slight lisp. Half-brother Morris is a great bear of a man with the mind of a child. He is kept locked in a room, plays with a toy train and is adept with a lasso... This is a strange, eerie and gripping mystery.
Bony, passing himself off as the vacationing owner of a sheep ranch, is investigating the murder of a naked man found in a locker at Split Point Lighthouse. Inspector Snook has failed to identify the dead man but Bony, working on the assumption that the murderer must have been a local person who knew the schedule of the Lighthouse Inspectors, insersts himsclf in the local people. He shares and sympathizes with their joys and sorrows, past and present, and finally he unravels an unhappy story and solves the mystery.
Added by: math man | Karma: 198.35 | Fiction literature, Audiobooks | 11 March 2011
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The House of a Thousand Candles
A reputedly wealthy and eccentric old man dies in Vermont.His home,the House of a Thousand Candles,so called for the owner's preference to candle light,is left empty save a faithful servant--his fortune mysteriously vanished,though rumored to still have been hidden in the house somewhere. John Glenarm,the late old man's grandson,stands to inherit the estate(and so the secret fortune)under the stipulation that he live in the house for one year.If he fails,the house will be forfeited and awarded to Marian Devereaux,the niece of the nun who operates the nearby Saint Agatha's School for girls....
Two men are killed by cyanide poisoning before Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte comes to Broken Hill to take up the case, and a third dies soon after he arrives. All die in crowded public places, and all are elderly and single. Witnesses recall a woman being near each man before he died, but their descriptions seem to be of entirely different women. Clues are old and witnesses have been mishandled by an inept investigator before Bony arrives in the prosperous mining town, but with the help of the local constabulary, a professional burglar vacationing in Broken Hill, Inspector Bonaparte mounts an investigation to try to identify the murderer before she finds another victim.
Two widows have already been murdered when Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (as Mr. Knapp, psychiatrist) comes to Broome. The murders seem to be without reason and apparently without clues. In his patient, meticulous manner, Bony collects infinitesimal facts and begins to build a picture of the murderer, but he becomes increasingly disturbed as the moon grows old and he feels that there might be another murder. A third murder is committed, but Bony has acquired enough facts to lay a trap for the murderer, avert the fourth crime, and expose the killer.
