The Death Messenger

Jigger Masters-hard¿nosed, unflappable, and blessed with a nose for the devil's smallest tracks-returns in The Death Messenger: The Complete Cases of Jigger Masters, Volume 4. Two savage, old¿time pulp mysteries test his wits against theatrical murder, chemical horrors, and crimes that seem to answer to no earthly law. In "The Death Messenger," a Long Island estate of eccentric experimenters becomes the stage for a sequence of deaths so ingenious and bizarre that even seasoned troopers call it witchcraft: invisible knives that fly from the dark, an explosion that erases a man from existence, a vapor that eats leather and flesh, and finally, something buried inside a gleaming plaster model that refuses to stay hidden. Masters must cut through crate¿loads of deception-false identities, whispered societies, and vivid misdirection-to find a killer whose art is disappearance itself. In "A Giant in the Swimming Pool," the Tegarth brothers' basement laboratory holds a scientific secret worth killing for: massive centrifuges, sealed tanks of "heavy" water, and a private swimming pool wired into the plant. When an elevator is sabotaged, an explosion rocks the lab and a man is found at the bottom of an emptied tank, the scene engineered to look like an impossible accident. Masters peels back staged scenes, slow¿acting chemistry and hidden plumbing to expose how someone weaponized invention and timing to turn technology into a murder method-and why a lowly night watchman might risk everything to grab the prize. Lean, atmospheric, and crackling with period detail, The Death Messenger collects two of Rud's best Jigger Masters cases-detective fiction with the pulpy heart of early¿20th¿century menace.