The Girl in the Cellar

A tale of memory loss and murder starring a British sleuth who "has her place in detective fiction as surely as Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot" ( Manchester Evening News ). She awakes in a dark place. A young woman with a shattered memory, she knows neither who she is nor how she came to be in this abandoned house. All she possesses is a faint sense that someone is lying dead at the foot of the stairs. Horrifyingly, she is correct. In the cellar lies a young woman, her body broken, her head split, her life undone by a revolver's shell. The amnesiac flees and finally has a stroke of luck: She meets Maud Silver. A dowdy governess turned daring detective, Miss Silver sees immediately that something is wrong. She comforts the confused young woman and coaxes out of her what little story she can tell. The memory of the body sets Miss Silver on a fantastic adventure—the last written by Patricia Wentworth, and one of the most thrilling of them all. Praise for the writing of Patricia Wentworth: "Miss Wentworth is a first-rate storyteller." — The Daily Telegraph "Patricia Wentworth has created a great detective in Miss Silver, the little old lady who nobody notices, but who in turn notices everything." —Paula Gosling, CWA Gold Dagger Award winner "Some of the best examples of the British country-house murder mystery." — Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine