When Emma Marsh is asked by her old pal Mary, a visiting diva at the Central City, Colorado, Opera House, to desert the summer heat of 1942 Boston to help her with a little romantic problem, Emma smells trouble. After all, Mary of all people ought o know better than to get involved with a tenor. But Emma dutifully kisses her boyfriend Hank Fairbanks goodbye, reluctantly turns over the running of J. Graham Antiques to its owner, and boards a train for the Rockies. Besides it just might her get over the pending loss of Hank—who enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor—to Army Intelligence.

Soon after she arrives in Central City, Emma stumbles across the body of the tenor, encounters a very strange old man who seems to run the town, and spots what she thinks could be a nest of German spies. The old man offers to help catch the murderer but Emma can’t help but think he just might be covering up his own guilty tracks. There are plenty of candidates for murderer among the members of the opera company, including Mary, who appears to be keeping company with yet one more tenor—one with a decidedly Germanic bearing.

If only Emma could account for the movements of all the suspects—but that, unfortunately, would require that she stay awake through one entire performance of the opera, a feat that seems beyond her abilities. Imbued with the same sparkling humor that Murder is a Collector’s Item (currently out of print) and Murder is a Serious Business a big hit with readers and critics alike, Murder a Mile High was first published in 1944 and is one of the earliest detective novels to fully utilize Colorado as a setting.

Reviews

“Fascinating.”
—Romantic Times

“An endearing glimpse of Central City and Denver during World War II… the dialogue twists and turns… reads like a Nick and Nora movie…charming.”
—The Mountain Ear

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