Rex Stout

Madeline Fraser, radio talk show host extraordinaire, had a natural dread of dead air. So when one of her on-air guests signed off at the mike after drinking a glass of a sponsor’s beverage, it was a broadcaster’s nightmare come true. Enter Nero Wolfe. He agrees to take the case, with his sizable fee contingent on his solving the murder. But to Wolfe’s surprise, everyone connected to the case now lies in unison about it. And as the...

"When a bright young heiress iwth a flair for romance and one too many enemies is found brutally murdered, Nero Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie, find themselves embroiled in a case that is not as black and white as it first appears." - Cover p. [4].

When an abandoned baby is left on her doorstep, the young socialite widow knows only too well the identity of the father: her deceased philanderer of a husband. But who is the mother? The case seems like child's play to Nero Wolfe, until the first dead body. While the police nurse their grudges against him, and the widow nurses Archie, the genius sleuth and his sidekick look for the hand that rocked the cradle. But nothing can pacify the killer, who's...

There's no one or 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. The oversize genius and his able assistant Archie Goodwin soon find out why the prize is so generous as they lock horns with the FBI. And these highly trained G-men have a way with threats, tails, and bugs that could give even...

“Nero Wolfe towers over his rivals. . . . He is an exceptional character creation.”—New Yorker
What do a Wild West lynching and a respected English nobleman have in common? On the surface, absolutely nothing. But when a young woman hires his services, it becomes Nero Wolfe’s job to look deeper and find the connection. A forty-year-old pact, a five-thousand-mile search, and a million-dollar murder are all linked...

Paul Chapin’s college cronies never quite forgave themselves for instigating the tragic prank that left their friend a twisted cripple. Yet with their hazing days at Harvard far behind them, they had every reason to believe that Paul himself had forgiven them—until a class reunion ends in a fatal fall, and the poems, swearing deadly retribution, begin to arrive. Now this league of frightened men is desperate for Nero Wolfe’s help....

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 strikes thrice in these three baffling mysteries of crime and detection. First, Stout's great detective, Nero Wolfe, develops an appetite for the sweet taste of revenge when someone slips something most foul into his lunch. Then, a couturier's beautiful sister uses Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's man about town, as her ready-made alibi–and maybe fall guy–unless Wolfe can spot the loose ends in a nearly seamless crime. Finally, Wolfe has...