Murder of a Lady, a Dr. Eustace Hailey mystery from Anthony Wynne, has been out of print since 1931. Poisoned Pen's reprint now makes this archetypal locked-room mystery from an excellent era of British crime fiction available to a new generation of readers.
Mary Gregor, elderly sister of the Laird of Duchlan, is found dead in her room. Her bedroom door was locked, and her windows were latched shut. There is no sign of a weapon, although Mary was clearly stabbed with something sharp. The only clue is a tiny herring scale next to her body.
The confident Inspector Dundas is called in, but becomes quickly stymied. Several more murders take place--and each time the scale of a herring is found. Superstitious locals begin to whisper of murderous fish people slithering up from the water during the night.
As hysteria mounts on the Duchlan estate, Dr. Eustace Hailey, a local amateur sleuth, steps in to try his hand at solving the crime. Instead of focusing on the impossibility of the locked windows and door (as Inspector Dundas has), he turns his attention to the psychological makeup of the residents of Duchlan, and discovers that Mary Gregor was hiding a dark secret.
The novel has several rather obvious mystery tropes (the locked room, people confessing for other people, blundering policemen). But when one remembers that Murder of a Lady is an early crime novel that laid the groundwork for many more mysteries over the years, it seems much more fresh. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm