The Book of the Crime

A strange tome and a terrified wife draw a 1950s antiquarian book dealer into a murder case in this mystery by Agatha Christie's favorite American author.
Young Rena Austen, newly wed, is afraid she's made a terrible mistake. Her husband, once a dashingly romantic figure of a wounded war hero, has become a moody lay-about, and they are sharing a gloomy house on the Upper East Side of New York with his unpleasant, always-there family. When her husband reacts in a frighteningly angry way to Rena pulling a particular volume off the library shelf, she has had enough, and flees her home in fear for her life. Thankfully, Henry Gamadge is on hand to solve the mystery of the book-and the dead body that inevitably turns up.
"Henry Gamadge will be well remembered as one of the most civilized detectives in fiction, investigating some of the most subtly conceived of criminal cases." - New York Times