“Where There’s a Will” 
    by Rex Stout

Review #188
This is the eighth novel in Rex Stout's long-running Nero Wolfe series, published in 1940.


In it, we meet the famous Hawthorne sisters, three women who have wealth and power in the fields of politics, academia and acting respectively. They have just buried their brother and are outraged to find that in his will, he left symbolic fruit to the sisters, a pittance to his wife (disfigured by him in a bow-and-arrow accident, she always wears a veil to conceal her face) and the remaining $7 million to his mistress. It's not the money, it's the scandal that has them so upset, and they want Nero Wolfe to find a way to persuade Naomi, the mistress, to give up at least half of that bequest.


Despite the dire state of his bank account, Wolfe is not interested, until it turns out that the brother was murdered. He had not, accidentally, shot himself as originally thought. Suddenly the will's provisions take second place. Now Nero Wolfe is requested to find a murderer.


In this novel, the unexpected happens. Nero Wolfe leaves his home and office! Even his secretary/right hand man, Archie Goodwin, is surprised. Wolfe meets a family that is as eccentric as he is and he has to sift through the different stories, denials, and confessions to discover the truth.


I adore all the Nero Wolfe books (those I've read so far, anyway) and this is no exception, with the added twist that solving the crime rests on Wolfe's knowledge of botany, a nice convergence of two of his main interests.