Wife or Death

Ellery Queen

Sep. 2015 · Open Road Media

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A journalist accused of murdering his unfaithful wife searches for the real killer

Angel Denton’s extramarital activities are the worst-kept secret in town. Jim Denton has endured the cuckold’s horns for ages, but by midnight on Halloween he’s finally fed up. Deserted at a masquerade ball, he takes refuge at the bar while his wife flirts her way up and down the dance floor in a costume so revealing she risks being arrested for indecency. Lightning strikes, the electricity goes out, and Denton overhears his wife planning a tryst with another man. The next morning, he finds a note saying that she’s leaving him. And he never sees Angel alive again.
 
A week later, the police find Angel in the woods, her once-beautiful body mangled by wild dogs. Everyone is sure Denton killed her, and to save his own neck, the desperate husband will have to find Angel’s last lover—and take revenge.

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Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery.
 
Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1928, when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that was later published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who uses his spare time to assist his police inspector uncle in solving baffling crimes. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired Queen upon Lee’s death.