Anita Boutell

Death Brings a Storke / Cradled in Fear Anita Boutell

Death Brings a Storke: In not at the birth but not long after the death is Dr. Archibald "Archie" Storke, when during a pleasant breakfast one morning with his wife Janey he receives a urgent call from the housekeeper at Whiteleaves, home of Andrew Herrick, informing him that her employer has been discovered dead in his sitting room, with a ghastly gunshot wound to his head. It is thought Herrick committed suicide, but the doctor is doubtful. Though this is Archie's "first murder" in the charming English village of Pennerford, where he and Janey, native Londoners both, have resided for the last five years, he shows uncommon perspicacity in discerning the truth in behind the shocking affair. A classic tale of detection, Death Brings a Storke (1938) was the first published crime novel by Anita Boutell, an American expatriate chosen by mystery fiction scholar Howard Haycraft in his book Murder for Pleasure (1941) as one if the rising stars of British manners mystery, and has now been reprinted for the first time in nearly eighty years. Cradled in Fear: After a whirlwind courtship of three weeks, young Molly Nash, mostly alone in the world, married Sheridan "Sherry" Prescott. Now she has traveled with her handsome new husband to the old family mansion at Prescott's Point, Connecticut, a gloomy Victorian edifice clinging to a forbidding cliff overlooking Long Island Sound. But what did Molly really know about Sherry, and just what grim mysteries are hidden behind the walls of the house at Prescott's Point? What Molly does not know could be the death of her. . . . First published in 1942, Anita Boutell's fourth and final crime novel (and her only one set in the United States) is a classic tale of sinister psychological suspense reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Dorothy Macardle's The Uninvited.

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