A Difficult Problem

Can a perfect crime be detected even when there appears to be no crime at all? In A Difficult Problem, Anna Katharine Green delivers a thought-provoking short mystery that unravels not through action, but deduction. At the heart of the story is a seemingly innocent dinner party and a suspicious death that leaves one woman troubled by the unease that lingers in the aftermath. What she intuits-though others dismiss it is that something is amiss, and perhaps terribly wrong. With elegant brevity and subtle tension, Green builds a case from whispered observations, minute details, and moral instinct. A pioneer of the classic detective form, she demonstrates how questions of ethics, guilt, and intuition often reveal more than overt evidence. This story is a brilliant example of how crime fiction can explore not only what happened, but what should have happened and whether knowing the truth is ever enough.