3 1/2 stars, really. When newly divorced advertising designer Gwynne Dacres rents the cheapest room she can find in Harriet Garr’s boarding house, she little suspects how its tenants will enliven her life, and not in a good way. She thinks of the house as a “listening house,” one seemingly poised to take in her every move. She quickly finds out that it is the landlady who is listening and observing, in order to preserve her own secrets from the past. Mabel Seeley published this book in 1938, toward the end of the Great Depression, and I’ve never read a book that depicts the struggles of working people in this period so well and so matter-of-factly. Most of the tenants spend half or more of their take-home pay on rent, leaving them vulnerable to Mrs. Garr’s cranky rules and manipulation. Yet Mrs. Dacres remains a plucky investigator into the mysteries of this sinister house. She has suitors but they are very much secondary to solving the murder of the mob figure in the gully behind the house and the other crimes that follow. Seeley managed to incorporate police corruption and many other urban ills into the story. All in all, this is a Golden Age mystery—even though it’s not British—with a distinctly American, and even feminist, spin.