Welcome to the Vickers estate near East Orange, New Jersey, where the middle class is destroying the neighborhood, erecting their horrid little cottages, playing on the Vickers tennis court, and generally disrupting the comfortable life of Hammond Vickers no end.  It’s bad enough that he had to shell out good money to get his daughter Lissa a divorce in Reno only to have her brute of an ex-husband show up on his doorstep. But why does there also have to be a corpse in the cellar? And lights going on and off in the attic? Lissa, on the other hand, welcomes the newcomers into the neighborhood, having spotted a likely candidate for a summer beau among them. But when she hears coal being shoveled in the cellar and finds a blue dandelion near a corpse, what’s a girl gonna do but turn detective, popping into people’s cottages and dipping dandelions into their inkwells looking for a color match. And she’d better catch the killer fast, because Detective Sergeant Timothy Frobisher says that only a few nail files are standing between her and jail. Originally published in 1939, The Black Gloves was one of 21 wacky mysteries written by the Little sisters and is a sparkling example of the light-hearted cozy mystery that flourished between the Depression and the Korean War. It won’t take you long to understand why these long out-of-print titles have so many ardent fans.

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“I’m relishing every madcap moment.”
—Murder Most Cozy  

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