he was honored for his work in book illustration with a major exhibition at Brandywine River Museum. He lives and works in Philadelphia.bChapter 1br/bbrDorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar-except a small hole, dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap-door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.brbrWhen Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.brbrWhen Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife@õÂ? (öÿ¾Û€  (less)

classic authors of the detective tale as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Dulcie Gray, Christianna Brand, June Thomson, G. K. Chesterton, E. C. Bentley, Michael Innes, Georges Simenon, and Raymond Chandler, along with nineteenth-century forebears like William Wilkie Collins, are such eminent names in the field as Ellery Queen, John Wainwright, Antonia Fraser, and P. D. James. New to this volume, too, are taut, literate tales of criminal intent and murderous purpose like Lawrence Trent's B as in Bludgeon, Elwyn Jones's To Protect the Innocent, F. Tennyson Jesse's Lot's Wife, Sir Basil Thomson's The Hanover Court Murder Case, and Hulbert Footner's The King of the Gigolos. Accompany the sleuths in these engaging and challenging tales as they seek the key to the mystery -- some of them with superior intelligence, others with dogged determination, an overactive curiosity, or intuitive brilliance -- and as they crack The Moabite Cipher of R. August Freeman or solve The Mystery of the Child's Toy by Leslie Charteris or discover what The Judge Corroborates by J. S. Fletcher. You'll be continually, chillingly, and amply riveted./Div  (less)