Rex Stout

There’s no one and nothing the great detective Nero Wolfe wouldn’t take on if the price was right. That’s something wealthy society widow Rachel Bruner is counting on when she writes him a check for a whopping hundred grand. But even Wolfe has a moment’s doubt when he finds out why the prize is so generous. For the oversize genius and his able assistant Archie Goodwin are about to lock horns with the FBI—and those highly...

An invaluable sample of the early work of one of America's finest mystery writers Decades before detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie Goodwin, first struck fear into the hearts of Manhattan's criminals, Rex Stout wrote fiction for All-Stories Magazine. By the time the Wolfe series brought him fame, Stout had put his early work behind him, and made no effort to preserve it. At the time of his death, these early mysteries and suspense stories...

What could make Nero Wolfe so determined to solve a crime that he would be willing to work entirely without fee or client? What would it take to put him, for the first time, at a loss for words? What would make him so angry about a case that he would refuse to speak to the police, even if he has to spend fifty-one hours in jail as a result? Never before in the Nero Wolfe books has Rex Stout shown us the extremes to which the greatest detective in...

Murder lurks in the wings of the sprawling Fifth Avenue penthouse of multimillionaire Otis Jarrell, who has just retained Nero Wolfe on a case of the utmost confidentiality. But even the master detective cannot prevent tragedy when it inevitably arrives wielding Jarrell's missing revolver. Soon a second victim dies, and Wolfe must piece together the truth behind Jarrell's scandalously ill-behaved family.