Amelia Butterworth

The Amelia Butterworth Mysteries is a series of three novels featuring Amelia Butterworth teaming up with Ebenezer Gryce. Miss Butterworth is a nosy high-society lady whose wealth and lack of family give her plenty of free time in which to solve several Victorian-era crimes. 

Originally published in 1897, That Affair Next Door is Anna Katherine Green’s eighth book featuring the series detective Ebenezer Gryce and the first to feature the society spinster, Amelia Butterworth. Many consider the nosy Miss Butterworth to be the precursor to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver. The story is told from Miss Butterworth’s perspective as she relates the story of a murdered young woman and how she sets out to unravel the mystery.

A dead woman is discovered in the parlor of an empty luxury home in New York's famed Gramercy Park. Thus opens Anna Katharine Green's popular detective novel That Affair Next Door.  

This second installment of the Amelia Butterworth series by Anna Katherine Green is full of mystery and fun. Proper (and somewhat nosy) Miss Amelia has found herself enticed by Mr. Gryce, the famous detective, to leave her comfortable upper-class life and once again put her instinctive detective skills to work, this time in a small mountain village that hides a heinous secret beneath its surface of quiet country charm.

A man is found dead in the study of his New York City house and Detective Gryce is called upon to deduce the how and why of his murder - if it is indeed a murder. With the assistance of Miss Amelia Butterworth, Gryce must investigate the meaning of the meager clues, including the cries of a talking bird, in order to uncover what happened to the victim. Solving this crime will involve several generations of two families. Author Anna Katharine Green was often referred to as "the mother of the detective novel" and was an early influence on Agatha Christie.