Review #99
Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn, New York: Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee
Inspector Richard Queen has finally reached mandatory retirement age and is staying with an old friend, who retired only to take up a much quieter police chief job in a sleepy New England seacoast town. The 3rd-person viewpoint is mainly split between Richard, who's privately depressed, feeling he's outlived his usefulness, and Jessie Sherwood, a professional nurse looking after a newly-adopted baby for a childless rich couple, Alton and Sarah Humffrey.
The story opens with some up-close details of what turns out to have been an illegal adoption, the Humffreys would have been too old for an adoption through channels, so they essentially bought the child. (The birth mother, an unwed nightclub singer, is actually a decent person, the slimy go-between, A. Burt Finner, only persuaded her to go through with it by selling her the idea that the wealthy adoptive parents could give the kid a better life than she could.)
Unfortunately, the flaw in that theory is that various parties, the ne'er-do-well nephew, for one, find it inconvenient to see a sizeable fortune suddenly redirected to an unexpected small baby.
After Jessie and Richard meet casually on the beach while she's out with the baby, he insists on coming along with the chief when there's a report of an attempted kidnapping on the estate. When tragedy finally strikes, Richard and Jessie join forces in some unofficial investigating.
Ellery Queen at their best!
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