The Bat

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Overview

An infamous thief hides in the countryside—where cunning Cornelia Van Gorder picks up the trail—in a mystery from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author.
 For months, the city has lived in fear of the Bat. A master criminal hindered by neither scruple nor fear, he has stolen over one million dollars and left at least six men dead. The police are helpless, the newspapers know nothing—even the key figures of the city’s underworld have no clue as to the identity of the Bat. He is a living embodiment of death itself, and he is coming to the countryside.
There, he will encounter the only person who can stop him: adventurous sixty-five-year-old spinster Cornelia Van Gorder. Last in a long line of New York society royalty, Cornelia has found old age to be a bore, and is hungry for a bit of adventure. She’s going to find it—in a lonely old country house where every shadow could be the Bat. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781480436480
Publisher:	MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Publication date:	08/13/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	286
Sales rank:	302,971
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) was one of the United States’s most popular early mystery authors. Born in Pittsburgh to a clerk at a sewing machine agency, Rinehart trained as a nurse and married a doctor after her graduation from nursing school. She wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her young husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909), established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn’t long before she was one of the nation’s most popular mystery novelists.
Among her dozens of novels are The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911), which began a six-book series, and The Bat (originally published in 1920 as a play), which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane’s Batman. Credited with inventing the phrase “The butler did it,” Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she began writing much earlier than Christie, and was much more popular during her heyday.  

Table of Contents

Contents

1. The Shadow of the Bat,
2. The Indomitable Miss Van Gorder,
3. Pistol Practice,
4. The Storm Gathers,
5. Alopecia and Rubeola,
6. Detective Anderson Takes Charge,
7. Cross-Questions and Crooked Answers,
8. The Gleaming Eye,
9. A Shot in the Dark,
10. The Phone Call from Nowhere,
11. Billy Practices Jiu-Jitsu,
12. "I Didn't Kill Him.",
13. The Blackened Bag,
14. Handcuffs,
15. The Sign of the Bat,
16. The Hidden Room,
17. Anderson Makes an Arrest,
18. The Bat Still Flies,
19. Murder on Murder,
20. "He Is—The Bat!",
21. Quite a Collection,