The Forsaken Inn

Anna Katharine Green set this 1890 novel in a lonely old inn in Revolutionary-era America, telling the story through a manuscript left behind by its former landlady, Mrs. Truax. Her journal reopens a crime buried sixteen years earlier: Edwin Urquhart, loved by two sisters, marries the elder and brings her to the inn on their wedding night, where the young bride is killed and hidden inside a secret chamber. Unusually for Green, the murderer is known almost from the start. What she holds back is the complicated love story and jealousy that led to the act, uncovered slowly as the diary moves between past and present. The result leans toward gothic suspense rather than straight detection, showing a wider range than the label ‘mother of the detective novel’ suggests.