The Swimming Pool, Mary Roberts Rinehart
The Swimming Pool, Mary Roberts Rinehart
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The Swimming Pool

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Narrator: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Unabridged: 11 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/15/2021


Synopsis

Two reclusive sisters. A crumbling mansion. A dead doppelgänger. The New York Times bestseller from the author known as the American Agatha Christie.

The Birches was one of the grand mansions of the 1920s, with a ballroom, tennis courts, and, of course, a swimming pool. But after the crash of '29, when Lois and Judith's father killed himself to escape his debts, the family turned the summer home into a fulltime retreat from the world. Decades later, Judith is the queen of New York society, a fast-living beauty whose nerves are beginning to fray, while Lois still lives in the dilapidated old mansion, writing mystery novels to pay the bills. She is about to encounter a mystery of her own.

To stave off a nervous breakdown, Judith moves in with her kid sister. Terrified of an unnamed threat, she nails her windows shut and locks the door. Soon, a woman is found dead in the pool—a stranger who bears a shocking resemblance to Judith. In a family with a history of tragedy, a chilling new chapter is about to be written.

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 mark on March 22, 2020

A tense and moody affair. A body in the swimming pool. A heroine who knows little but steps up bravely, each and every time. An atmospheric setting. The glamorous past revisited, deconstructed, glossed over, forgotten and remembered and reevaluated, memories like yellowing photos in an album crumbli......more

Goodreads review by Bev on August 26, 2019

Lois Maynard and her brother Phil live in genteel poverty at The Birches, the family estate. The estate is all that is left to them after the family fortunes took a decided dip after the crash of 1929 and their father's suicide shortly thereafter. Between Phil's job as a middling sort of lawyer and......more