The Album

By Mary Roberts Rinehart

On a quiet cul-de-sac, an elderly invalid is slaughtered with an axe.

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784088248

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Often referred to as the American Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart was an American journalist and writer who is best known for the murder mystery The Circular Staircase—considered to have started the “Had-I-but-known” school of mystery writing—and the popular Tish mystery series. A prolific writer, Rinehart was originally educated as a nurse, but turned to writing as a source of income after the 1903 stock market crash. Although primarily a fiction writer, Rinehart served as the Saturday Evening Post’s correspondent for from the Belgian front during the First World War, and later published a series of travelogues and an autobiography. Roberts died in New York City in 1958.

Reviews for The Album

[schmerguls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I know I really liked this book and I thought Mary Roberts Rinehart was a great author. When I read a book by her recently, K, I was underimpressed indeed.

[portialong · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed reading this quaint twisty-turny murder mystery.

[victorianrose869 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

January 29, 1999The AlbumMary Roberts RinehartIn cleaning out Mom’s library a few weekends ago, I came across half a dozen of the Mary Roberts Rinehart mysteries I’d bought years ago in NYC. Their primary attraction at the time had been their wonderfully detailed, grotesque covers! The same artist had done all of them. This one shows the bedroom of old Mrs. Lancaster on a chilly midnight blue background, with the severed head of a woman sitting in an otherwise empty birdcage! An axe is nearby. I checked on Amazon. Com and found that the latest reprints of her books have different covers now, so you can’t get these anymore.The story itself is macabre, told by 28-year old Louise Hall. Five odd, isolated families live on a large plot of land called The Crescent, cut off from the rest of the world. One hot August afternoon, old Mrs. Lancaster is found murdered – with an axe, of course – in her bedroom, and from there goes many theories: the two devoted daughters who have given up marriage and family of their own to care for her; or Jim, a Crescent neighbor who was seen leaving the house…everyone is a suspect, and there’s a lot more murder to come before it’s all over. The butler, a daughter, a neighbor. In th end, the strange, ancient existence of The Crescent is irrevocably changed.