The White Priory Murders

The White Priory Murders presents an 'impossible situation' regarded as the best Mr Dickson has given us, according to Torquemada in The Observer, 1935.

"Sir Henry is at his best in this baffling yarn, and so is Carter Dickson," praised The New York Times in 1934.

James Bennett has been invited to stay at White Priory for Christmas among the retinue of the glamorous Hollywood actress Marcia Tait. Her producer, her lover, the playwright for her next hit, and her agent are all present, soon becoming suspects when Tait is found murdered on a cold December morning in the lakeside pavilion. Only the footprints of her discoverer disturb the snow which fell overnight and which stopped just shortly after Marcia was last seen alive. How did the murderer get in and out of the pavilion without leaving a trace?

When Bennett's uncle, the cantankerous amateur sleuth Sir Henry Merrivale, arrives from London to make sense of this impossible crime, the reader is treated to a feast of the author's trademark twists, beguiling false answers, and one of the most ingenious solutions in the history of the mystery genre.