Three Cape Cod Mysteries

Asey Mayo fans will be delighted to find the codfish Sherlock not once, but thrice perplexed in these incomparable novellas: Murder Rides the Gale, The Stars Spell Death, and The Third Murderer.

Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1909–1976) lived in Boston and Cape Cod for most of her life. She was the author of the Asey Mayo mystery series and, under the pseudonym Alice Tilton, the Leonidas Witherall mystery series. She also wrote under the name Freeman Dana (Murder at the New York World's Fair).

“These period who-dunnits recall simpler, more carefree times, and sparkle with the Yankee wit and salty idiom of Asey Mayo, a local handyman who knows something about police work and everything about everybody's business.”
—Marilyn Stasio, Mystery Columnist for the New York Times Book Review

“Few pleasures in life equal curling up by the fire with a Phoebe Atwood Taylor mystery. Her evocative novels bring us back to a simpler time when the Cape was just beginning to emerge as a summer resort known around the world. In Taylor's Cape even the lovely seaside villages, with their sand dunes and beaches, were not immune to the most vile of human impulses. In this milieu Taylor's wise and witty home-grown detective Asey Mayo baffled the summer folk with good humor as he set their neat little world right again. Long may he sleuth!”
—Paul Kemprecos, Co-author, Raise the Titanic

“Taylor was, for twenty years, the foremost writer of mysteries set on the Cape, and her legend lingers on, an inspiration to all of us who tell yarns about snakes in the Eden consisting of the Cape and Islands.”
—Philip R. Craig, Author, A Vineyard Killing

“Phoebe Atwood Taylor is an American original whose work should be known by every fan of the genre. Her Asey Mayo mysteries are wry, wise, and witty, giving a Cape Cod twang to the mystery in its Classical Era. I discovered her at the same time I started reading Agatha Christie, and have always looked back at her books with intense fondness.”
—Lev Raphael, Author, the Nick Hoffman mysteries

“Miss Taylor's plots are smart, her characterizations penetrating, and her understated social comments timeless. The series in its entirety is a requirement on the bookshelf of all mystery collectors.”
—Dorothy B. Hughes, Author, In a Lonely Place

“What a treat to have the humor of Asey Mayo available again in the delicious detective fiction of Phoebe Atwood Taylor.”
—Otto Penzler, Owner, The Mysterious Bookshop

$10.95 (Can. $15.99)
0-88150-171-9
February 2005
5 x 7, 256 pages, Paperback