Red Lamp/The

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Book Overview

William Porter has just inherited Twin Hollows, an isolated lakeside estate shrouded in mystery and doom. But William and his wife aren't easily swayed by ghost stories and whispered rumors. Until a shadowy apparition beckons to them from the undying glow of a red lamp. Is a stranger with a deadly purpose trying to frighten them away? Or are they being haunted by a chilling warning from the grave?

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0821720171
• ISBN13: 9780821720172
• Release Date: March 1987
• Publisher: Zebra Books
• Length: 351 Pages
• Weight: 0.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Possibly Mary Roberts Rinehart's Best Mystery

I was very surprised to see the only other review for this novel state that it is among the author's worst books. Just goes to show how differently a work of art can hit different people!The Red Lamp is definitely that...a work of art. I've read all of Mary Roberts Rinehart's mysteries, but it is this one - The Red Lamp - that I most frequently pull off the shelf for a fourth or fifth reading.This book is a little creepier than many of the other Rinehart mysteries; it has a subtle undercurrent of the supernatural running through it. The characters are very vivid (especially that of the narrator) and the book manages to make a number of philosophical observations that remain profoundly relevant today.As to the plot, the mystery itself is top-notch, and the killer's motivation one of the most unusual and disturbing I have seen in any "golden age" mystery. This book's overall style reminds my very much of that extremely popular ghost novel of the early 1940s: "The Uninvited" by Dorothy Macardle. To compare the style and plot devices of The Red Lamp to more modern works, I would say it is also similar in structure and tone to those supernatural mysteries written by Barbara Michaels from the 1960s - 1990s (which still remain popular today).I'll close this review with a bit of trivia. While The Red Lamp does not depend on a supernatural killer, it does end with some of its inexplicable events purposely left unexplained. Upon reading the author's autobiography, I learned that she had some genuinely weird experiences, in a summer home she briefly occupied, and these became a partial inspiration for The Red Lamp.