The Bride Dined Alone

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., for the Crime Club. Very Good in Very Good dj. 1943. First Edition. Hardcover. [moderate shelfwear, slight exposure of board at lower corner of rear cover, one-time owner's handwritten notes about date and place purchased at edge of rear pastedown (hidden by jacket flap); the jacket is edgeworn, with tiny bits of pape loss at several corners, some internal tape repair/reinforcement, and a couple of closed tears and a connecting horizontal crease at the bottom of the front panel]. Psychological murder mystery, about a woman who "had married money, not once but three times," and whose "return to her family home forced her finally to face some bitter, unlovely facts" and to discover "that beauty can be a boomerang, and cleverness outsmart itself." This was one of five mystery novels by this Canadian-born author (1892-1961), all published in the 1940s; she was also a journalist and foreign correspondent who wrote a number of books about Brazil (which was also the setting for her first two mystery novels, "The Owl Sang Three Times" and "Satan Has Six Fingers"). .