The French Powder Mystery is a spell-binding tale of crime, intrigue, and extraordinary deduction. At crowded noon, in front of Fifth Avenue's most fashionable department store, while hundreds of sidewalk onlookers watch a demonstration of modernistic furniture in the window, the demonstrator touches a button regulating a concealed wall-bed -- the bed swings out of the wall -- and from its dark recesses tumbles the distorted, crumpled corpse of a beautiful woman....
Ellery Queen moves vitally and refreshingly through his own story -- a slender, cynical young man with a genius for piercing the veil of commonplaces and arriving at foolproof conclusions. Old Inspector Queen, his father, again takes you through the complicated process of a police investigation, although it is Ellery who is responsible for the solution of one of the most stimulating and baffling detective stories ever written. And the denouement is surprising and yet inevitable.