John M O'Connor

Anonymous Footsteps John M O'Connor

Henry Lanard was dead, appallingly dispatched with a knife to his chest as he lay on his deathbed, fatally ill with pneumonia. Who would murder a dying man? Seemingly the single clue to a cruel and crafty killer had been briefly glimpsed by beautiful Ethel Baines, the visibly distraught nurse who discovered her employer's body: snowy prints left by anonymous footsteps.



Perilously trapped with Ethel Baines in the snowbound Lanard mansion on an isolated Adirondacks island are Henry Lanard's physician, Alfred Trevor, to whom Ethel is secretly married; Lanard's frivolous widow, Frieda; his calculating attorney brother Courtney; his sardonic spinster sister, Janet; his handsome black sheep son, Neville; and his servants, the married couple Sophie and Cowpers Freedly, respectively cook and butler, and Hodges, the uppish chauffeur. In spirit as well, hovering like a malignant specter over the grim mansion, is the beautiful Elizabeth Lanard, deceased youngest child of the Lanard clan. Additionally, in classic tradition another person unexpectedly appears in the midst of the murder maelstrom that engulfs the mansion.



Will this unexpected guest prove friend or foe? And who in the house of death will survive a long winter's night of heart-freezing terror, in which an anonymous slayer strikes with impunity again and again?



Anonymous Footsteps was first published in 1932.