Eccentric multimillionaire Cadmus Cole hires Ellery Queen to investigate a case but won't say what it is. When Cole dies mysteriously at sea, Queen and his partner, Beau Rummell, must navigate a thicket of complications that includes a fifty-million-dollar legacy, two beautiful but avaricious women vying for the inheritance, a will with some odd provisions, and even a phony Ellery Queen.
Ellery Queen is a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn—Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (1905–1982), and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee (1905–1971)—to write detective fiction. In a successful series of novels that covered forty-two years, Ellery Queen served as both the authors’ name and that of the detective-hero. The cousins also cofounded and directed Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential English crime-fiction magazines of the twentieth century. They were given the Grand Master Award for achievements in the field of the mystery story by the Mystery Writers of America in 1961.
Fred Sullivan is an actor and an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator. He has played over one hundred roles as an award-winning resident actor at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. He is resident director at Gamm Theatre and teaches acting at the Rhode Island School of Design.