Customer Reviews

The Mayor's Wife

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If you appreciate secret passageways, menacing messages in mysterious cipher, hidden treasures, floor boards that creak in the night, cranky old butlers, crazy old ladies, and beautiful heroines tormented by nameless fears - you should enjoy this mystery as much as I did.

Young Miss Saunders desperately needs work, so she accepts a peculiar job as temporary companion to the mayor's wife, a once serenely happy woman who has suddenly become nervous and depressed. The mayor is campaigning and can't be home with her. Basically he needs a kind-hearted and resourceful spy to unravel the mystery and restore his wife's happiness. A tall order, but Miss Saunders is not lacking in wit, heart or courage.

It quickly becomes apparent that the mayor and his beautiful wife, who love each other dearly, have rented a haunted house. For some years no tenant has stayed there longer than a month. Miss Saunders, of course is too sensible to believe in ghosts. She intends to find the natural cause behind the supernatural manifestations that the house offers up quite regularly.

This may not be the greatest of Green's novels, but it's well stocked with colorful characters, and the reader and Miss Saunders get to grapple with multiple mysteries.

Anna Katharine Green was a shy, introverted, Victorian-style woman with a wonderful talent for creating fearless, no-nonsense women investigators. Her plots were so ingenious that some contemporary critics thought she must be a man writing under a female pseudonym. Although her works are not much in the public eye these days, they influenced both Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. I personally think Green deserves a revival, and I'm on a project to read all her novels.

I had never heard of Anna Katherine Green. She was born in
New York City in 1846, the daughter of a criminal attorney.
She had to have attended many of her father's trials in court;
she is a fantastic writer. I never thought I would find a writer
that is right up there with Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie,
Wilkie Collins(strong reminder) and John Dickson Carr. I have
just finished, "The Mayor's Wife" published in 1907(!) and almost
read straight through 387 pages. Also have read, "That Affair
Next Door" and "Lost Man's Lane" (this one especially intriging
as in a smalll village on one particular short lane, people
have been disappearing and no one knows where to as there are
only like 4-5 houses on the lane. Miss Butterworth, a very
much "Miss Marple" lives in NYC and a retired policeman asks
her to help him with this case and as she has been planning to
visit a deceased college mate's children who just happen to
live on that lane, she is in for one mystifying experience.
I,m sure if I manage to read all of Green's books still in
print, I will feel as I did with Holmes and Christie; wanting
please just a few more (and a few more, etc i,m sure!)