The Tracer of Lost Persons

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906) is Robert W. Chambers's twenty-four-chapter collection of detective stories built around Mr. Keen, the quiet, keen-eyed director of a New York bureau that traces missing people — and missing motives. The chapters interleave the bureau's cases with the courtship of the wealthy young clubman Gatewood and the charming Miss Southerland, who become Mr. and Mrs. Gatewood midway through the book. Keen's adventures take him from the reading room of the Lenox Club into police precincts with the blunt Captain Harren, through the parlor tricks of the mind-reading girl Miss Borrow, along the trail of the slippery swindler Joram Smiles, and into an eerie Egyptian revival where the ancient priest Samaris stirs awake and the smiling face of a portrait seems to move. Late in the book he works the long, tangled case of the mysterious Carden, aided by the competent Miss Smith and the resourceful young woman doctor Dr. Rosalind Hollis, and he plays the part of the elderly Dr. Austin Atwood with his usual disguise-craft. Chambers — the author of The King in Yellow — mixes brisk wit, romantic banter and genuine chills: the stories keep the reader guessing exactly how any lost person can be found, and what the tracer will find when he does.