Lenore Glen Offord (1905–1991)

Inside dust jacket: A pattern of sudden death is difficult enough to unravel in a normal, well0ordered community. When it occurs in one of those odd and fantastical California 'colonies,' its complicatons are many and wild. They were definitely too much for Inspector Nelsing of the Berkeley police, for all that he had a steady. logical brain. Perhaps that was just the trouble with Inspector Nelsing, and perhaps that was why it took Todd and Georgine McKinnon (who figured so bravely in The Glass Mask and Skeleton Key), to come up with the solution.
Events in The Smiling Tiger take place at the, to say the least, picturesque home of Chloe Majendie, widow of the founder of a religious sect called Beyond Truth. The events are peculiar; they involve some unusual personalities, and they take the form of a series of extremely interesting murders. All this Lenore glen offord once again spins and conceals and reveals in her well-known manner.… (more)

Mystery writer Todd McKinnon, Georgine Wyeth and "irrepressible eight-year-old Barby" investigate a death in a gingerbread Victorian on the Pacific Coast. The trio made their debut in SKELETON KEY. Title is from Browning's "The Laboratory".
From 1001 Midnights: In The Glass Mask, the chief responsibility for detection shifts from Georgine Wyeth to pulp writer Todd McKinnon, though the story is told from Georgine's viewpoint. Todd, Georgine, and Georgine's eight-year-old daughter stop off in a Sacramento Valley town to satisfy his curiosity about a family mystery: Did Gilbert Peabody hasten the death of his ailing grandmother in order to inherit her house and thus be able to afford to marry? There is no proof, only verdict by rumor. Unable to face the innuendo, Gilbert has enlisted in the army and gone, leaving his wife to deal with the ownsfolk and the more unpleasant relatives. By varying means, she tricks and inveigles the McKinnon-Wyeth ménage into staying on day after day toInvestigate the nocturnal footsteps in the attic, the family patriarch who ants and feigns seizures, and the mystery of what the old lady got from the bank the day she died and where she hid it. This is an entertaining tale, and one of Offord's best. (Susan Dunlap)… (more)