Keene: Pattern in Black and Red

Prodigal son Shadwell Dunn has returned to the rambling Southern mansion and family home, Handsome Creek. When a visitor from Africa is violently murdered, the investigation is entangled with secrets from the past, voodoo superstitions, and a family curse.

Additional

First published in 1934.

Author

Faraday Keene was the pseudonym of Cora Jarrett.

Review

An old southern mansion, a prodigal son, a taciturn, mysterious bacteriologist, a beautiful woman—all moving against the subtle, insinuating background of black magic, and you have the milieu for Faraday Keene’s murder-drama Pattern in Black and Red. The old aristocratic Dunn family lived in a rambling house in Frisbie county, at their head young Shadwell who had run away from school and wandered the world before coming home to take over the management of family affairs after the death of his father. With generations of southern breeding behind them, the Dunns live in care-free laziness, completely sufficient unto themselves. So their lives had gone and would have gone on had it not been for a visit paid them by a casual friend Shadwell had picked up in South Africa. With shattering swiftness the household was thrown into horrified chaos because a week after his arrival this Mr. Voorhees is mysteriously and brutally murdered. Immediately the reader is plunged into a situation which makes Pattern in Black and Red the sort of mystery story that is impossible to put down until finished. Miss Keene has built up the tension of her story bit by bit to a swift, smashing climax that ought to surprise even the oldest hands at murder sleuthing. And she has obviously deeply studied her characters and her plot, analyzing them with a keen psychological astuteness that places this mystery far above the general run of detective stories. (St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 30, 1934)