The Siamese Twin

Ellery Queen takes refuge from a wildfire at a remote mountain house, arriving just before the owner is murdered…

When Ellery Queen and his father encounter a raging forest fire during a mountain drive, the only direction to go is up—up a winding dirt road that leads to an isolated hillside manor, inhabited by a secretive surgeon and his diverse guests. Trapped by the fire, the Queens settle into the uneasy atmosphere of their surroundings; the tension rises the following morning when their host is discovered dead, apparently shot while playing solitaire the night before. The only clue is a torn six of spades. The suspects include a society beauty, a suspicious valet, and a pair of conjoined twins. When another murder follows, and a torn jack of diamonds is discovered, left as a dying clue, the killer inside the house becomes as threatening as the mortal flames outside its walls. Faced with a complex set of alibis, motives, and evidence, Ellery Queen must rely on his powers of deduction and logic to uncover the murderer’s identity—but can he solve this whodunnit before the fire devours its subjects.

Featuring bizarre circumstances, eerie atmosphere, and a dazzling solution, The Siamese Twin Mystery is a fair play mystery in which the reader has all the necessary information needed to solve the puzzle. The seventh Ellery Queen novel (which can be read in any order) finds the legendary sleuth facing one of the most memorable cases of his career.

Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing the greatest puzzle-mysteries of their time, gaining the duo a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery. Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1928 when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who uses his spare time to assist his police inspector father in solving baffling crimes. Besides co-writing the Queen novels, Dannay founded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired the fictional Queen upon Lee’s death.

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