Talk:The Bittermeads Mystery

Reviews
The Bookman Oct. 1922:
 * A well done thriller with a real mystery ably sustained by several villains, Lord Cobham's heir, and a lady under a cloud.

The Literary Digest, 23 Sept. 1922:


 * HUNDRED PER CENT. VILLAINY


 * Rupert Dunsmore has long had his suspicions concerning the death of his uncle, but he can not get the police to share them. Later the singular disappearance of his friend Charley Wright does not seem to arouse them to action, so Dunsmore resolves to take matters into his own hands, retires from view long enough to grow a heavy beard and, thus disguised, proceeds first to Bittermeads, the house where Charley Wright had last been seen. There is a pretty girl living there with her mother and her stepfather, Deede Dawson, to whom Charley had been devoted, and Dunsmore hopes to learn something of his friend from her. But it behooves him to proceed cautiously, so he reconnoiters at night and surprizes a burglar at work on one of the windows. He stuns him, takes advantage of the open window and enters the house where, after sundry adventures, he makes his way to the attic where he finds a packing-case with the cover not yet nailed down. Mechanically he opens it and his electric torch shows him the face of his friend with a bullet hole in his forehead; his search is ended. He is preparing to go to the police to denounce Dawson when a voice behind him says: "Put up your hands or you're a dead man." It is Dawson. …


 * []


 * Such is the story of "The Bittermeads Mystery," by E. R. Punshon (Knopf, $2.00), a thrilling tale into whose pages more villainy is comprest than is often to be met with, and which will hold the reader breathless to the end.