The Father Hunt [Paperback]

All pretty Amy Denovo wants to find the father she has never seen, but she can’t afford Nero Wolfe’s outlandish fees . . . or can she? Suddenly she’s knocking on the oversized detective’s door with a parcel full of bills in hand—and a quarter of a million hidden in her closet. It’s all part of a nest egg left by her unknown father. But when Wolfe and his able assistant, Archie Goodwin, begin to trace the money to the man, they make a startling discovery: Amy’s father murdered her mother—and now he may be after her.

“It is always a treat to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. The man has entered our folklore.”—New York Times Book ReviewRex Stout(1886–1975) wrote dozens of short stories, novellas, and full-length mystery novels, most featuring his two indelible characters, the peerless detective Nero Wolfe and his handy sidekick, Archie Goodwin.Chapter 1
 
It happens once or twice a week. Lily Rowan and I, returning from a show or party or hockey game, leave the elevator and approach the door of her penthouse on top of the apartment building on Sixty-third Street between Madison and Park, and there is the key question. Mine is, Do I stay back and let her do it? Hers is, Does she stay back and let me do it? We have never discussed it, and it is always handled the same way. When she gets out her key as we leave the elevator she gives me a smile which means, “Yes, you have one, but it’s my door,” and I smile back and follow her to it. It is understood that mine is for situations that seldom arise.
 
That Thursday afternoon in August we had been to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets clobber the Giants, which they had done, 8 to 3, and it was only twenty past five when she used her key. Inside, she called out to Mimi, the maid, that she was home, and went to the bathroom, and I went to the bar in a corner of the oversized living room, with its 19-bl3%