The Man in Lower Ten...

"McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business. I never liked it, and since the strange case of the man in lower ten, I have been a bit squeamish. Given a case like that, where you can build up a network of clues that absolutely incriminate three entirely different people, only one of whom can be guilty, and your faith in circumstantial evidence dies of overcrowding. I never see a shivering, white-faced wretch in the prisoners' dock that I do not hark back with shuddering horror to the strange events on the Pullman car Ontario, between Washington and Pittsburg, on the night of September ninth, last..."

And so begins "The Man in Lower Ten," the first of Mary Roberts Rinehart's many classic mystery tales. Rinehart's characteristically complex plot twists and turns through a series of mysterious events, featuring forged documents, embezzlement, theft, a murder, mysterious intruders, an awkward romantic triangle, and, right in the middle of it all, an attorney whose average, everyday, uneventful life is disrupted when he becomes the victim, the suspect, and the sleuth ... all at the same time.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876-September 22, 1958) was a popular and successful American writer best known for her mysteries. Sometimes referred to as "the American Agatha Christie," Rinehart's first mystery novel actually appeared over a decade before Christie's. She is considered the originator of the "Had-I-But-Known" style of mystery, as well as the source of the phrase "The butler did it."