The Egyptian Cross Mystery

'Murder on Christmas day' is the newspaper headline no one wanted to read... A true classic from the golden age of crime fiction. 'Brilliant' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY When a small-town schoolteacher is discovered dead, beheaded, and tied to a T-shaped cross on December 25th, Ellery Queen is intrigued enough to take a closer look. But when he arrives, Queen is met with too few clues and too little evidence to produce a satisfactory verdict, even for a master sleuth such as himself, and so returns home, defeated. But when an identical murder occurs - followed by several more - Queen discovers a horrific connection to a strange cult. This is a disturbing puzzle unlike anything he's encountered before, and it will take all of his powers of deduction to uncover the killer.

Ellery Queen is both a fictional detective and the pen name shared by his creators, Brooklyn-born cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay. The character first appeared in a book that won a mystery-writing contest and was eventually published in 1928 as THE ROMAN HAT MYSTERY. The amateur detective character of Ellery Queen shared an apartment with and assisted his father, the NYPD's Inspector Queen. As well as dozens of Ellery Queen novels, the cousins wrote numerous radio scripts and short stories featuring their detective, and were the joint recipients of several EDGAR AWARDs from the Mystery Writers of America, including the 1960 GRAND MASTER AWARD. In their time Lee and Dannay were considered to be the foremost American writers of the Golden Age 'fair play' mystery, with Dannay said to have largely provided the plots and Lee most of the writing. The cousins also founded ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE in 1941, which is still considered one of the most influential crime fiction publications of all time. While Frederic Dannay outlived his cousin and co-author by 11 years, he retired from writing at the time of Lee's death.