The Burning Court

By John Dickson Carr,

Book cover of The Burning Court

Book description

While researching a book on nineteenth-century murders, Edward Stevens is shocked to find a picture of an executed murderess who is identical to his wife

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Burning Court as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

John Fowles’s 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman is famous for its two endings, but this Grand Master from the Golden Age of mystery fiction was there thirty-two years earlier. Carr specialized in impossible crimes of the locked-room variety, although he expanded the concept considerably. 

The Burning Court cleverly combines a fictional contemporary murder plot with a sensational true case from seventeenth-century France in a way as intellectually daring as it is macabre — and utterly unexpected.

I began reading Carr as a teenager and have been re-reading him out of sheer fascination with (read: addiction to) his ingenuity…

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