The Hex Murder - Williams Alexander

Clad only in a filmy nightdress, brutally murdered Marguerite Scholl lies horribly dead in the bedroom of her tiny Greenwich Village apartment, her throat cut so deeply that her head has been nearly severed from her body.

Who among the free-loving and loose-living denizens of the Village hated the beautiful blonde stenographer with such awful passion as to do this dark and bloody thing? Police suspicion lands fast on Marguerite’s live-in boyfriend, struggling artist Bob Crocker. But seasoned crime reporter Peter Adams, who seemingly always manages to be on hand for a murder, thinks Bob is innocent. (“The lice!” he raves about the perfunctory police investigation. “They’re so damn sure Crocker bumped this girl they don’t even bother to look around!”)

Spurred by the weird writing and cryptic symbols left at the scene of the crime, Peter, along with another of Bob’s women friends, Houston King, looks into Marguerite’s hidden past in the backwoods of Pennsylvania to find a motive for murder. There the pair finds stranger things than ever were seen even in bohemian Greenwich Village. . . .

Inspired by events in a notorious and bizarre 1928 slaying, The Hex Murder is an original and engrossing detective novel, a “shuddery” [Saturday Review] vintage classic back in print for the first time in over eighty years.