The Filigree Ball by Anna Katherine Green

I am reading ‘The Filigree Ball‘ by Anna Katherine Green

Another Vintage Mystery! There are so many great ‘old’ mysteries that I don’t seem to get around to the new ones too often. This is my second A.K. Green book. She is a wonderful mystery writer. Written in 1st person, she takes us through the crime scene through the detectives eyes. Very descriptive, you can visualize everything the detective is seeing. In this story a new detective, no name given yet, to Washington D.C. has been summoned by a quirky man called Uncle David to come to his deserted family home to investigate a light he has seen moving in the windows. The home has a tragic past and has not be inhabited for years. The home was built before the White House. There have been 3 mysterious deaths over the decades. Each one a man found dead on the stone hearth in a certain room in the house. David’s niece insisted there is no such thing as a curse or hauntings so she determines to be married in the house and during her wedding a man’s body is found dead on the hearthstone. When word reaches her she and all the guest flee screaming from the house. Now sometime later the light is seen in the windows.

The Detective, eager to make a name for himself and further his career, enters the old mansion to investigate. He finds the niece, Veronica Moore, dead from a gun shot in the same room as the hearthstone although she is not on the hearthstone. On first examination he determines suicide, but upon closer investigation decides it could be murder. I love her wording…‘Some one else-some one whose breath still lingered in the air about me-had extinguished this candle flame after she fell, and the death I looked down upon was not a suicide, but a murder.’

What could a strangely soiled, dainty handkerchief point to? And how about the book pulled out an inch more than all the others on the shelf (with no dust on the top of it) or the five clear spots in the dusty mantel that are obviously where some man’s finger tips rested. And there is the pencil drawing hanging above the mantel in the bedroom room. Nothing special, totally uninteresting and faded. But it seems to have an eerie presence about it. Was this what the man that left the fingerprints was looking at? And why? What does all this have to do with Veronica laying dead in the other room?

Good mystery so far, I am hooked!

Check out this post I did previously on Anna Katherine Green and read my review on another of her novels.