The Unknown Quantity

by Mignon G. Eberhart

1st edition Popular Library 1968 paperback, fine In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Mystery, Romance

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Mignon Good (1899-1996) was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. She studied at Nebraska Wesleyan University from 1917 to 1920. In 1923 she married Alanson C. Eberhart, a civil engineer. After working as a freelance journalist, she decided to become a full-time writer. In 1929 her first crime novel was published featuring 'Sarah Keate', a nurse and 'Lance O'Leary', a police detective. This couple appeared in another four novels. In the Forties, she and her husband divorced. She married John Hazen Perry in 1946 but two years later she divorced him and remarried her first husband. Over the next forty years she wrote a novel nearly every year. In 1971 she won the Grand Master award from the Mystery Writers of America. She also wrote many short stories featuring banker/amateur sleuth James Wickwire (who could be considered a precursor to Emma Lathen's John Putnam Thatcher) and mystery writer/amateur sleuth Susan Dare.

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good mystery but Sarah's kind of a wimp

[Ethan Hulbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love me some Mignon Eberhart and this book was really one of the better ones from her, which is saying a lot. It was a little different than many of her mysteries so I could see why someone would be turned off by it, but I enjoyed it. Loved the misdirects, the intrigue, the betrayals and double crossings. It was NOT predictable, not to me anyway, and I loved the various reveals and all the secrets.

Of course some of the romance was predictable as usual, and I did feel like it could've used a little bit more action. But still, this was a fun one.

[robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good atmosphere, great descriptive writing, a rather predictable and unlikely love story - I didn't enjoy it as much as others because there seemed a lot of waiting for things to happen.

Eberhart does write some perfectly unlikeable women! Unlikeable men too, but the women, egad. She writes some real beeotches.

[Scilla · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book of the 1950's has many aspects of the 1920's, with romance and mystery. At the request of her husband, a young woman pretends an unknown man who looks like her husband is her husband. Meanwhile, several people are murdered, and the woman is in danger.