Fortyish spinster Rachel Innes has taken a house in the country for the summer, and goes there with her nervous maid Liddy, who, “with a face as long as the moral law,” is “never so happy as when she is making herself wretched.” Intrusions and alarums happen even before the arrival of Rachel’s nephew Halsey and niece Gertrude, whom Rachel has raised ever since the death of her sister, when the children were small. Halsey is in love with the daughter of the landlord of the house, and the landlord’s son is soon murdered, shot from the circular staircase during one of the many nightly ruckuses. Gertrude is in love with the cashier of the landlord’s bank, which soon fails, with the blame falling on the young cashier.
Rachel helps the detective, Jameson, to work out the mystery, being the one who interviews the dying cook, and also the one who finds the secret room in the house. The slow-moving plot, and its many intricacies, mar the book, but it shows up on many lists of classic mysteries and is remembered as the prime exemplar of the Had-I-But-Known school of mystery fiction, where the narrator often uses some variation of that phrase to foreshadow later plot developments.
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