In the dead of night on a lonely Melbourne street, a cabbie discovers to his horror that his drunken passenger has been murdered -- poisoned with a chloroform-saturated handkerchief. The killer, his motive, and even the victim's identity are unknown. The last person to be seen in the victim's company cannot be identified and has vanished into the streets of the Australian metropolis. The solution lies within a labyrinth of dark secrets, missing papers, evasive witnesses, and a deadly game of blackmail.
Ever since the publication of this 1886 mystery, the two-wheeled carriage known as a...

Mrs. Pittman's well-to-do Pittsburgh family didn't approve of her marriage, so the young bride moved away and lost touch with her relatives. Years later, she has returned to her native city as a widow and now runs a boarding house, one of the only jobs available to respectable women in the early twentieth century. Rooms at Mrs. Pittman's place are cheap because of the annual floods from the Allegheny River, which inundate the building's basement and first floor. Ordinarily, the overflowing waters are just a mild nuisance but this year the flood takes a sinister turn when a headless corpse...