Hildegarde Withers Books in Order

Third-grade teacher Hildegarde Withers takes her class to the New York Aquarium and finds a murdered stockbroker in the penguin pool. Her first clash and partnership with Inspector Oscar Piper is funny, brisk, and full of sharp clues.

Miss Withers discovers a fellow teacher murdered after school, only for the body to vanish before Inspector Piper arrives. With the killer still somewhere inside the building, the school becomes a locked-in crime scene.

A young man is found hanged after his roadster crashes in Manhattan traffic, and his twin brother falls under suspicion. Miss Withers and Inspector Piper face an impossible street murder with a neat, nasty twist.

While vacationing on Catalina Island, Miss Withers insists that a man who dies after a short seaplane flight was murdered, not felled by illness. The island setting gives this case a breezy surface and a tricky core.

Crossing the Atlantic, Miss Withers sees a young woman disappear after a public humiliation aboard ship. The trail continues to London, where more deaths follow and even a haughty silver Persian cat has a part to play.

At a high-society dog show, Miss Withers and Inspector Piper step into a tidy little world of pedigrees, money, and spite after murder strikes. It is a compact Golden Age puzzle with a lively show-ring setting.

A glamorous model is found dead after an early-morning ride in Central Park, and the only clear witness is her horse, Siwash. Miss Withers quickly sees that an apparent riding accident hides a carefully staged murder.

When Oscar Piper lands in trouble in Mexico after a suspicious death, Miss Withers heads south to sort it out. Bullfights, wealthy Americans, and a bizarre public killing make this one of the series' most colorful cases.

Miss Withers goes to Hollywood as a consultant on a film about Lizzie Borden and walks straight into studio intrigue. When a threatened insider turns up dead, accidents and murder begin to blur.

A veteran returns from World War II, finds his old rival dead in a swimming pool, and becomes the obvious suspect. Miss Withers steps in to clear his name and uncover uglier motives beneath a polished social surface.

When a former neighbor disappears, Miss Withers starts tracing a pattern of middle-aged women who vanished after coming into money. Her search leads to a hotel, an undercover gamble, and a killer who trades on romance.

A man on death row leaves Inspector Piper money to reinvestigate the murder that sent him there. With only days to spare, Miss Withers races to prove that the case was never as open-and-shut as it looked.

This collection gathers Miss Withers short cases, including the title mystery, and shows Stuart Palmer in quick, playful form. The stories mix odd murder methods, brisk detection, and the familiar Piper-Withers friction.

A television comic is murdered after insulting his sponsor on the air, and the one witness who could nail the case disappears. Miss Withers has to find the missing young woman before someone reaches her first.

Retired in Los Angeles, Miss Withers is drawn into a poisoning case at a cartoon studio after a threatening sketch appears. When the obvious suspect is killed, the case turns nastier and far less simple.

A television comedian is dead, a key witness has vanished, and the easy suspect may be too easy. Miss Withers follows the missing woman through a tangle of show-business vanity, money, and fear.

A missing college student drifts into the counterculture of the late 1960s, and Miss Withers follows the trail west. The search pulls her and Oscar Piper into hippie circles, generational conflict, and murder.

This volume gathers previously uncollected Miss Withers stories from magazine pages and restores a lively part of the series. The cases are short, tightly plotted, and rich with Depression-era New York atmosphere.