The Chinese Orange Mystery

Voted one of the top ten Best Locked Room Mysteries of all Time

‘Ellery Queen IS the American detective story’ New York Times

‘One of the most bizarre puzzles in crime fiction’ Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

The offices of publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk has seen many things – but this is the most bizarre: the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty room. Nobody entered or exited – and yet everything inside the room has been manipulated, and left upside down and backwards. Stuck through the back of the corpse’s shirt are two long spears – and a tangerine is missing from the fruit bowl.

Amateur sleuth Ellery Queen arrives just in time to witness the discovery of the body – and realises that even the smallest clues could be crucial to solving this most extraordinary murder…