Death on Riverside Drive : A Hercule Bouvard Mystery

A locked room. A missing sextant. A river that knows too much.

New York, 1950. When the reclusive maritime collector Edwin Elsworth is found dead in his study on Riverside Drive, the door is locked from the inside, the key still in the lock, and the doctor is satisfied: a failing heart, nothing more. No wound. No poison. No sign that any other living soul was ever in the room.

But Elsworth’s cook does not believe it. She has kept his house eleven years, and she knows the study told a different story before it was tidied, a catalogue closed that should have been open, and a single brass sextant gone from a cabinet where nothing was ever moved.

So she writes to the one man who listens to what a room remembers.

Hercule Bouvard, the patient, precise Belgian detective, arrives to find a death that could not have happened, in a room no one could have entered, over an object no one will admit is missing. And as he follows the trail of the vanished sextant, he uncovers something far older and colder than a collector’s murder: a ship that went silent on the Hudson in the autumn of 1919, a fortune built on a secret worth killing for, and eleven names the river has kept in the dark for thirty-one years.

Someone wants that secret raised. Someone wants it buried forever. And between them stands an old man’s quiet discovery, and the detective who refuses to let the dead go unnamed.

Death on Riverside Drive is a classic golden-age murder mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie, meticulously plotted, richly atmospheric, and layered with three unforgettable twists. Perfect for readers who love a fair-play whodunit, a brilliant detective, and a locked-room puzzle that keeps its secrets until the final pages.

Perfect for readers who love: Agatha Christie · Hercule Poirot · Anthony Horowitz · Richard Osman · locked-room mysteries · 1950s historical crime · golden-age detective fiction

The Hercule Bouvard Mysteries can be read in any order. Each is a complete, standalone case.