MABEL SEELEY wrote seven mysteries between 1938 and 1954, all of them wonderful period pieces set in the Midwest. Her books received rave reviews when they were first published in New York, and they remain every bit as good today.

In The Crying Sisters, Seeley sets the atmosphere and characters for this compelling story in her opening words: “I still pinch myself and say it isn’t true. I still wake at night to reach for the tangible proof within touch of my hand. Because what happened to me last August went so far outside anything I’d known all the rest of my life that even while it was going on I often thought I must be imagining.”

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“The Crying Sisters is the Crime Club selection for this month, and it is an excellent mystery novel of the ‘atmospheric’ type. The story is involved, and sometimes it moves slowly. But it holds its interest from the beginning as it rises in crescendo toward climax.”
—The New York Times

DUST JACKET

MABEL SEELEY wrote seven mysteries between 1938 and 1954, all of them wonderful period pieces set in the Midwest. Her books received rave reviews when they were first published in New York, and they remain every bit as good today.

The Crying Sisters was Mabel’s second book, written in 1939 when she was thirty-six years old. She had already spent ten years writing advertising copy when, in 1936, she “retired from a profession paced too fast for me, determined never to put pencil to yellow paper again.” The next year she was at work on her first novel, The Listening House, which brought her immediate critical and popular success.

In The Crying Sisters, a “Crime Club Selection,” the author sets the atmosphere and characters for this compelling story in her opening words: “I still pinch myself and say it isn’t true. I still wake at night to reach for the tangible proof within touch of my hand. Because what happened to me last August went so far outside anything I’d known all the rest of my life that even while it was going on I often thought I must be imagining.

“On one day I was Janet Ruell, a respectable small-town librarian, driving north in my new car from Eldreth, Minnesota, for the first vacation I’d ever taken without my mother. My life had been openly humdrum and secretly desperate—the way life in a small town is for a girl who’s still unmarried at twenty-nine. And then the next day I was agreeing to go to an unknown resort under conditions which—well, Eldreth would have looked at them slant-eyed.

“Agreeing to go. There’s no getting away from the fact that I went of my own free choice. I went of my volition into those days when I heard death crying in the night, when I saw it indicated by a plantain leaf and discovered in a plaything, when I saw it rising in a muddy bundle from the lake. The time was to come when I felt myself living in the very house of death and eating at its table. And in the end . . .

“I wonder if I’d have had the courage to take what Steve Corbett offered me if I’d had premonitions.”

Cover painting by Paul S. Kramer