Suspects – Nine (The Bobby Owen Mysteries) (Volume 12)

“Know him?” he asked.

Bobby was for a moment too surprised to answer. He had thought of every one else but not of the man whose dead face now was staring up at him.

“Yes. I know him,” he said.

Bobby Owen’s fiancée and milliner to the wealthy, Olive Farrar, has a problem. It concerns two competitive society matrons and a missing hat. But it becomes a case of murder when the butler of one of the ladies is shot dead, his body stabbed after the fact. While investigating, Bobby encounters many suspicious characters who might have done it – eight in total. Lurking in the shadows is a ninth suspect – but who can it be?

Suspects – Nine, originally published in 1939, is the twelfth novel in the Bobby Owen mystery series. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

“What is distinction? The few who achieve it step – plot or no plot – unquestioned into the first rank… in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time.” Dorothy L. Sayers