The Great Mistake, Mary Roberts Rinehart
The Great Mistake, Mary Roberts Rinehart
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The Great Mistake

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Narrator: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Unabridged: 11 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/15/2021


Synopsis

In an elaborate house known as the Cloisters, Maud Wainwright rules supreme. The queen of society in the small town of Beverly, she has a table long enough to seat one hundred, and she keeps an iron grip on the guest list. Her right-hand woman is Pat Abbott, a local girl who is beautiful, innocent, and kind. Pat has no idea how cutthroat high society can be, but she’s about to get a deadly first lesson.

Pat has fallen head over heels in love with Maud's son, Tony, a clever young rake with a single flaw: his vicious, gold-digging wife. At the same time that she is dangerously infatuated with a married man, Pat's world is turned upside down by a series of attacks on the estate—and a truly shocking murder. To save Tony and Maud, Pat must find the killer. But the list of suspects is as long as one of Maud's guest lists: When a woman has room at her table for one hundred friends, she’ll have more than her share of enemies.

"Anyone who aspires to become a writer," said the New York Times, "could not do better than to study carefully the methods of Mary Roberts Rinehart." The Great Mistake is a classic example of the golden age murder mystery at its best.

About Mary Roberts Rinehart

In her prime, American novelist and playwright Mary Roberts Rinehart was more famous than Agatha Christie. Originator of the phrase "The butler did it," she is best known for her mystery stories-including The Circular Staircase, The Man in Lower Ten, and Tish-which combine murder, love, ingenuity, and humor in a style that is uniquely her own. Several of her suspense novels were turned into Broadway successes, including The Bat (which was derived from The Circular Staircase).

Mary Roberts was born in Allegheny Pittsburgh in 1876. In 1896 Mary graduated from the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses, married physician Stanley Rinehart, and started a family. Financial losses drove Mary to take up a writing career in 1903. Childhood memories such as the nearby state penitentiary, the one-armed policeman, and a mute neighbor inspired her novels. Five years later, her first novel, The Circular Staircase, became an instant success.

In addition to her novels, the public grew to know Mary through the magazine serials and essays that she wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. During World War I, Mary served as a war correspondent and was one of the few that were allowed to report directly from the trenches. At the time of her death in 1958, her books had sold more than 10 million copies.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kathy on May 15, 2020

Published in 1940 originally, and I do recall reading books by this author many years ago. For Goodreads record this will appear to be the first I have read by Rinehart. It is a slow burn with the young woman narrator in the act of reconstructing events over a period of time in which she took a posit......more

Goodreads review by Lynn on April 07, 2017

This is a writing style that likely was popular when the book was written, but is a little arduous to read in 2017. Everything is prefaced by either gloomy apprehension, or alerts that something dire is to come. "We didn't know then that. . . ." "I should have seen that there was worse to come. . .......more

Goodreads review by Ryan on January 12, 2012

Well here it is, my first Mary Roberts Rinehart book of the year. It's nice to kick off the year with such a fabulous read and a revisit to an author I feel as if I've know for years. Of course it hasn't been for years. It's only been since the middle of last year that I discovered her, and boy am I......more

Goodreads review by Janelle on September 09, 2021

What a clever, complicated mystery! I loved the first person narration and the way the author built the tension and the suspense.......more