The Burning Court

A suspicious death has the hallmarks of witchcraft in this locked room mystery by a master of the genre.

When Edward Stevens, an editor at Herald and Son’s publishing house, learns of the mysterious events that befell his neighbor’s rich uncle, he shrugs off their seemingly supernatural circumstances. He’s a logical man and doesn’t give much credence to claims of a ghostly figure visiting the man before his death, or the witch’s ladder discovered under his pillow after he passed.

But as suspicions of strange murder begin to creep in, it becomes harder for Stevens to ignore their eerie potential. His neighbor breaks into the cement-sealed crypt where his uncle is buried, only to learn that the corpse has vanished. Witness testimony further implicates the intrusion of the spirit world into the affair of the murdered uncle, and unsettling echoes of the past into the present push things even further past Stevens’ understanding of reality.

Will the events be logically explained, or is there something unexplainable at work? The answer lies in the pages of this atmospheric and haunting puzzler, which finds Carr, the master of the locked room mystery, operating at the peak of his powers.

A fascinating tale of murder, a disappearing corpse and of two persons who appear to be the reincarnations of long dead poisoners. The book fairly drips mystery.”
—New York Times

[The] finest of all fusions of deductive puzzle and supernatural horror.”
—Anthony Boucher

John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was one of the greatest writers of the American Golden Age mystery, and one of the only American authors to be included in England’s legendary Detection Club. Though he was born and died in the United States, Carr began his writing career while living in England, where he remained for nearly twenty years. Under his own name and various pseudonyms, he wrote more than seventy novels and numerous short stories, and is best known today for his locked-room mysteries. His beloved series character, Dr. Gideon Fell, was based on author G. K. Chesterton and appeared in twenty-four novels.

Introduction by Dan Napolitano