The Middle of Things

Walking home one night, a comfortable young man named Richard Viner stumbles on the body of a stranger in a dark London passageway, and an ordinary evening turns into a murder inquiry that pulls him steadily deeper. The dead man carried clues pointing to a hidden identity and an old wrong, and Viner, half-guided by his aunt’s appetite for sensational stories, follows threads of blackmail, disputed inheritance, and buried history toward the truth. J. S. Fletcher keeps the puzzle moving through respectable drawing rooms and shadier corners of the city, trusting patient detection rather than melodrama. First published in 1922, it is a representative outing from one of the most popular mystery writers of the golden age. Read it here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.