The Burning Court

30 January 2026

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

John Dickson Carr (Author)

With an Introduction by Dan Napolitano

Description

A suspicious death has the hallmarks of witchcraft in this locked room mystery by a master of the genre.

When Edward Stevens, an editor at Herald and Son's publishing house, learns of the mysterious events that befell his neighbor’s rich uncle, he shrugs off their seemingly supernatural circumstances. He’s a logical man and doesn’t give much credence to claims of a ghostly figure visiting the man before his death, or the witch’s ladder discovered under his pillow after he passed.

But as suspicions of strange murder begin to creep in, it becomes harder for Stevens to ignore their eerie potential. His neighbor breaks into the cement-sealed crypt where his uncle is buried, only to learn that the corpse has vanished. Witness testimony further implicates the intrusion of the spirit world into the affair of the murdered uncle, and unsettling echoes of the past into the present push things even further past Stevens’ understanding of reality.

Will the events be logically explained, or is there something unexplainable at work? The answer lies in the pages of this atmospheric and haunting puzzler, which finds Carr, the master of the locked room mystery, operating at the peak of his powers.

Reviews

"A fascinating tale of murder, a disappearing corpse and of two persons who appear to be the reincarnations of long dead poisoners. The book fairly drips mystery." — New York Times

"[The] finest of all fusions of deductive puzzle and supernatural horror." — Anthony Boucher

Paperback

9781613166994

135 x 206 mm • 312 pages

£9.99

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