The House of the Whispering Pines - Anna Katharine Green

I picked this book randomly from the list I copied from one of the other older books I read recently. This book was originally published in 1910. 

Elwood is taking a ride to clear his head when he sees smoke coming from a chimney. No one should be in this building, and so he goes to investigate. What he finds is the woman he loves leaving the house and his fiancé's body upstairs. That may seem a bit strange, and it is. Elwood wanted to run away with his fiancé's sister, but she decides not to go, and he ends up finding both women at the house. After that, he's suspected of the murder (something he seems surprised by), and the mystery gets more complicated when the sister is too ill to explain what happened that night.

Elwood is a twit. The initial part of the book is written in the first person, which was incredibly annoying. He pops up in front of the cops with his shoes in his hands, lies, was seen putting his hands on the marks on the woman's neck, but then he's shocked when they arrest him. I also wasn't impressed with the way he pitted the sisters against each other to begin with. Even at the end, I wasn't super impressed with him. The entire book isn't written from his perspective, so that was good.

Overall, I did enjoy this book. I downloaded an old library book off Google, but I wish I'd gotten a copy from Gutenberg. The type was too small, so I wasn't able to read it as fast as I wanted to. As to the story itself, I did enjoy it. Once I got past Elwood's part, I was more involved. I thought I had the culprit figured out, but I was wrong. I like that. The reveal was satisfying, and the ending was written well. I liked the writing style, and it wasn't hard to follow at all. If I had one complaint, it would be that the book might be a tad long for my taste, coming in at over 400 pages. Good Book!