The Beacon Hill Murders: Boston's Beacon Hill, a distinguished neighborhood of old mansions and old money, has been invaded, much to its mortification, by the Suttons, a family of well-heeled parvenus. The latest daring play of the head of the clan, rags-to-riches stock exchange gambler Frederick Sutton, is to break into Boston society--but this ambitious move proves his most daunting stake yet. On the night Frederick Sutton hosts for dinner at his grand estate his prim and disapproving attorney, Mr. Underwood, and that widow of impeccable taste and irresistible charm, Mrs. Anceney, the final course for the night turns out to be death!
When a murderer's bullet puts an end to Frederick Sutton's lofty social ambitions, there is only one person, seemingly, who could possibly have done the foul deed. But surely this person cannot be guilty of such an egregious social faux pas as murder! Then a second slaying takes place at the Sutton mansion, this one even more mystifying than the first, in a room guarded by Boston's finest. Fortunately keen-minded Inspector Kane, as chronicled by the admiring Mr. Underwood, has the acumen necessary to solve the baffling Beacon Hill murders.
The Back Bay Murders: Arthur Prendergast insisted both to Inspector Norton Kane of the Boston police and to Kane's loyal chronicler, the prim lawyer Mr. Underwood, that he was being menaced by some mysterious and malevolent unknown, but no one believed the terrified ravings of the neurotic young man. The very next day, however, Mr. Prendergast was found murdered, his jugular vein cruelly severed!
This was only the beginning of the reign of terror that cuts a swath of death at Mrs. Quincy's brownstone boarding house in the formerly sedate neighborhood of Boston's Back Bay. It seems scarcely believable that one of the seemingly innocuous residents at Mrs. Quincey's refined home could be guilty of the monstrous murders, but as Inspector Kane lectures Mr. Underwood, "You ought to know that under the surface of normal existence there are hidden currents which sometimes burst through. You shrink from them with horror, but I'm trained to expect their manifestations." Fortunately the keen-minded Inspector Kane is able to damn the fearsome currents bursting over this particular Back Bay brownstone when he brilliantly solves the baffling Back Bay murders.