The Album — Mary Roberts Rinehart

For years the five families on exclusive Crescent Place had lived in peaceful seclusion, their activities as regular as clockwork. The Halls, the Lancasters, the Talbots, the Wellingtons, and the Daltons would have sworn they knew each other as well as they knew their own families. Which was--as it turned out--not very well. As they discovered in the worst possible way when old Mrs. Lancaster was found in her bed, hacked to death with an axe.

It could have been any one of them. In fact, as the array of suspects and motives multiplied, it began to seem to young Louisa Hall that the only person she could be sure of was herself. Especially when the murderer struck again. And again. Louisa wasn't much on detective work. But she did happen to pick up on a few things that the police had not noticed. It was all a matter of knowing where to look. And when not to look...