Showing results by author "Dolores Hitchens" in All Categories

When Rachel Murdock and her sister Jennifer receive a call for help from their favorite niece, Lilly, in Breakers Beach, California, they quickly hop a train from Los Angeles to see her-but not before collecting their prized cat Samantha in a picnic basket and bringing her along for the ride.

Two teenagers fresh out of stir set their sights on what looks like easy money in Dolores Hitchens' Fools' Gold (1958) - and get a painful education in how quickly and drastically a simple plan can spin out of control. The basis for Jean-Luc Godard's film Band of Outsiders, Fools' Gold is a sharply told tale distinguished by its nuanced portrait of a sheltered young woman who becomes a reluctant accomplice and fugitive.

Detective Lieutenant Stephen Mayhew has been heard to complain that the murder of the Sticklemann woman was the damnedest case that he ever met up with; that it got progressively worse as it dragged along; and that it set him at such insane tasks as pulling hairs out of Miss Rachel's wealthy cat and forcing a timid fat woman to scream. Samantha, the cat to whom a fortune had been left, was very much the center of the whole story, from the moment when she brought in to Miss Rachel some delicious-looking raw meat, with glistening poison crystals on it, through to the time when she saw murder ...

Walking home wearily from an evening spent poring over the books of the Parchly Heights Methodist Ladies' Aid searching for a fifty-eight-cent error, Miss Jennifer Murdock becomes witness to a terrible scene: A man, stumbling drunk, arrives home–and just as he fumbles with his keys, gunfire erupts and kills him on the spot.

A strange encounter with a little girl named Claudia and a dead toad sparks elderly detective fiction fan Rachel Murdock's obsessive curiosity, and she winds up renting the house next door just to see how things play out. But soon after she and her cat Samantha move in, Rachel realizes they've landed right in the middle of a deadly love triangle that's created animosity among the three families who now surround her.