Title: Halfway House
First published: 1936
Description: Joe Wilson was a poor, itinerant salesman with a pretty young wife in Philadelphia. Joseph Kent Gimball was a wealthy, socially prominent New Yorker with an elegant and aristocratic wife. These two very different men were actually the same man, a bigamist leading a bizarre double life. His deception was revealed to the world after he was murdered in his "halfway house," a riverfront shack outside Trenton, New Jersey, that he used as a hideout to switch identities. But who killed him?
Ellery Queen, who is drawn into the case to help old friends, puts his finger on the central question: "Who was murdered -- Joe or Joseph?" Queen performs an extended feat of logical deduction from seemingly insignificant clues, such as a number of burnt matches, and finally develops a profile of the killer that can fit only one person in the case.
Subjects: Fathers and sons, Fiction, Novelists, Police, Fiction, general, Fiction, mystery & detective, general, Ellery Queen (Fictitious character), Bigamy
Places: New York, New York (State)
LC classification: PZ3.Q295 Hal, PS3533.U4 Hal