The Silk Stocking Murders — Anthony Berkeley

Roger Sheringham detects a snag in a series of suspected suicides in this classic mystery from “the most brilliant of Agatha Christie's contemporaries” (Publishers Weekly).
 
The founder of the Detection Club -- whose members included Agatha Christie, Hugh Walpole, and Dorothy L. Sayers among others -- Anthony Berkeley was one of the luminaries of mystery fiction's Golden Age. His creation of gentleman sleuth Roger Sheringham helped usher in a new era of psychological detection.
 
In The Silk Stocking Murders, Sheringham is hard at work as the Daily Courier's resident criminological expert, when he receives a letter from a vicar whose daughter is missing in London. Unable to resist helping the desperate man, he discovers that the chorus girl hanged herself with her own stocking. When two copycat suicides occur, including that of a society beauty, Sheringham looks beyond the obvious to uncover the diabolical plan of a homicidal maniac . . .
 
Praise for the writing of Anthony Berkeley
 
“Detection and crime at its wittiest -- all Berkeley's stories are amusing, intriguing, and he is a master of the final twist.” -- Agatha Christie
 
“There never was another writer of detective stories who managed to make his red herrings smell so good.” -- The Observer
 
“Anthony Berkeley is the supreme master not of the ‘twist' but of the ‘double-twist.'” -- The Sunday Times