Murder Room

Contains four novellas: Stranger in the House; Sugar and Spice; The Murder in the Stork Club; Ruth.

In these deftly woven noir novellas, Vera Caspary draws on her own rich, independent life as a woman at a time of great social change, including her own experience of Manhattan''s Stork Club, which, from 1929 to 1965, was one of the most prestigious nightclubs in the world.

The title novella The Murder in the Stork Club features working-class detective Joe Collins, who is married to Sara Haworth, a writer of radio mysteries who belongs in Stork Club café society. Joe has to try to clear Sara''s name when an ex-lover is murdered shortly after she has dinner with him.