by Erle Stanley Gardner (Author)
Dealing with debtors turns deadly for a prickly PI in this hard-boiled mystery by the creator of Perry Mason and author of Bats Fly at Dusk.
A hot-headed widow and a glass-jawed ex-lawyer, Bertha Cool and Donald Lam seem like an unlikely duo of private detectives. Even so, they've managed to solve the most difficult of mysteries--when they're together. With Donald now on a European vacation, Bertha is hesitant to accept any new business--but money is money, and this new case seems routine enough . . . Bertha is hired to get sales engineer Everett Belder out of a $20,000 problem. Unfortunately, his troubles soon multiply. His wife is receiving poisoned-pen letters accusing him of infidelity. Then she disappears. And there's also the matter of the body in his cellar. With everything spiraling out of control, Bertha must determine who is behind this deadly game of cat and mouse before another murder comes into play. "No one has ever matched Gardner for swift, sure exposition." --Kirkus Reviews "The best American writer, of course, is Erle Stanley Gardner." --Evelyn WaughAuthor Biography
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) was the top selling American author of the twentieth century, primarily due to the enormous success of his Perry Mason Mysteries, which numbered more than eighty and inspired a half-dozen motion pictures and radio programs, as well as a long-running television series starring Raymond Burr. Having begun his career as a pulp writer, Gardner brought a hard-boiled style and sensibility to his early Mason books, but he gradually developed into a more classic detective novelist, providing clues to allow astute readers to solve his many mysteries. For over a quarter of a century, he wrote more than a million words a year under his own name as well as numerous pseudonyms, the most famous being A. A. Fair.