The Murder of Sigurd Sharon

<p><em>The Murder of Sigurd Sharon</em> (1933) is H. Ashbrook's third novel about the smart aleck playboy Spike Tracy. Spike is the brother of the Manhattan District Attorney R. Montgomery Tracy and has cultivated a reputation of someone who goes around nosing into affairs that aren't his and unearthing closely guarded secrets that doesn't make him exactly popular with certain parties. </p><p></p><p><em>The Murder of Sigurd Sharon</em> finds Spike Tracy stranded in rural Vermont with a dead car battery as he watches a young woman rushing down a hill in a futile attempt to catch the last train out of the village. Jill Jeffrey is a woman with a fluctuating personality. One minute she's a charming delightful creature and the next moment she turns into the most cold-blooded heartless hussy you'll ever meet.</p><p></p><p>Spike has to spend the night in the lonely isolated house where Jill lives with her ill bedridden twin sister Mary their guardian Dr. Sigurd Sharon and a frigid live-in nurse Miss Wilson. During that night Dr. Sharon is fatally stabbed in his bedroom and Jill is carried out of the room muttering that he can never hurt her again because he's dead. Murdered! </p><p>The case soon becomes increasingly complicated with a false confession and impossible disappearances from the house with all the exits either locked or guarded by policemen. So nobody could have left the house unseen and place is searched top to bottom without result. </p><p></p><p>Ashbrook has turned in a good old-fashioned Golden Age detective novel complete with an unbreakable alibi and surprise ending. It is an original piece of crime fiction from a long unjustly ignored mystery writer.</p>