When Perry Mason stumbles upon a classified ad for a brown-haired woman with specific physical attributes, he takes note of the seemingly suspicious request. Then the woman hired for the job reaches out, fearing that her new employer--who pays her and herchaperone to stay inside an apartment and answer to another woman's name--might be using her for nefarious purposes. But by the time Mason works out the first mystery, a second, with murder, is just...

"For devotees of the Golden Age mystery, the impossible crime story represents the period's purest form: it presents the reader with a baffling scenario (a corpse discovered in a windowless room locked from the inside, perhaps), lays out a set of increasingly confounding clues, and swiftly delivers an ingenious and satisfying solution. During the years between the two world wars, the best writers in the genre strove to outdo one another with unfathomable...