Seven complete Nero Wolfe novels
Nero Wolfe is an overweight misanthrope who almost never leaves his comfortable Manhattan brownstone -- hardly the description of a crackerjack detective. Yet Nero Wolfe is one of the best. When is an after-dinner speaker never boring? When he is murdered before he gets a chance to speak. In The Silent Speaker, Cheney Boone from the Bureau of Price Regulation is murdered before addressing the National Industrial Association. To ferret out the killer, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, his crafty assistant, unravel the tangled hatreds among free enterprise advocates, greedy civil servants, and those who enforce government regulations. In Might as Well Be Dead, a simple missing-person case leads Wolfe and Goodwin to an accused killer with a mysterious past -- a man on trial who doesn't want to be acquitted. Otis Jarrell comes to Wolfe and Goodwin in If Death Ever Slept with an urget request to get his daughter-in-law out of his posh duplex apartment. But before too long, family squabbles turn to murder. Death comes to Nero Wolfe in three unique ways in 3 at Wolfe's Door. Poisoned caviar in the blinis spoils Wolfe's dinner in "Poison à la Carte"; death comes by taxi to his brownstone in "Method Three for Murder"; and a rodeo roping contest held on a balcony one hundred feet above 63rd Street in New York is the scene of a murder in "The Rodeo Murder." Ordinarily chess isn't considered a dangerous game, but for Paul Jerin a night of play meant murder in Gambit. Sally Blount, daughter of the accused murderer, hires Wolfe to clear her father of accusations of foul play. Everyone knows corporate politics are vicious. In Please Pass the Guilt, a bomb kills Peter J. Odell, a vice-president at Continental Air Network, and Nero Wolfe enters the corporate jungle to find the murderer: frustrated secretary, bored wife, ambitious colleague, or someone else altogether? In A Family Affair, a friend of Wolfe's is killed in Wolfe's own brownstone, and he takes the case as a personal vendetta. Subsequently, Wolfe and Goodwin are led to facts they would rather not know and conclusions they would rather not make.