A Strange Disappearance

Anna Katharine Green followed her landmark debut with this compact mystery, again featuring the shrewd New York detective Ebenezer Gryce. When a sewing girl named Emily vanishes from the home of her wealthy employer, what looks at first like a simple runaway case opens onto older secrets of class, marriage, and hidden identity. Gryce, working alongside a narrator from the city detective force, follows the thread from a comfortable household into a very different past. Green, trained as a poet, gives the puzzle real human weight, and her care with procedure and evidence helped shape the American detective story years before Sherlock Holmes arrived. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB edition.