That Affair Next Door

This is where Anna Katharine Green introduced Amelia Butterworth, the sharp-tongued New York spinster who watches her neighbors a little too closely and becomes one of fiction’s first amateur women detectives. From her window Amelia sees a couple enter the shuttered Van Burnam house next door, and the next morning a young woman is found dead beneath a fallen cabinet. Convinced the police have fixed on the wrong story, Amelia both assists and quietly competes with the professional detective Gryce to name the killer. Green plays her nosy heroine’s social confidence against Gryce’s method, and the pairing predates Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple by decades. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB edition.