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    Over My Dead Body: A Nero Wolfe Mystery, Book 7
    Unavailable
    Over My Dead Body: A Nero Wolfe Mystery, Book 7
    Unavailable
    Over My Dead Body: A Nero Wolfe Mystery, Book 7
    Audiobook7 hours

    Over My Dead Body: A Nero Wolfe Mystery, Book 7

    Written by Rex Stout

    Narrated by Michael Prichard

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Nero Wolfe, lover of fine food and prize orchids, is a genius at daring detection. But he is always on guard when it comes to women. Now murder at a fencing studio engages him and his confidential assistant, Archie Goodwin, in a dangerous duel with death. The prime suspect is a Balkan beauty who has a secret reason for wanting Wolfe to clear her -- and a double identity that may be the perfect foil for covering up a killer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 3, 2007
    ISBN9781415940907
    Unavailable
    Over My Dead Body: A Nero Wolfe Mystery, Book 7
    Author

    Rex Stout

    Rex Todhunter Stout (1886 – 1975) was an American crime writer, best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe and assistant Archie Goodwin. The Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon 2000, the world's largest mystery convention, and Rex Stout was nominated Best Mystery Writer of the Century. Rex passed away in 1975.

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    Reviews for Over My Dead Body

    4/5

    219 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It's an ordinary day at the brownstone when a young woman shows up, needing help from Nero Wolfe. She, like he, is from Montenegro and has recently emigrated to New York City, where she and her friend have gotten work at a fencing/dance studio (I remember the very idea that such a place existed boggling the mind of teenaged me). Now her friend's been accused of stealing some diamonds from a client's coat pocket, and they want Nero to bail her out. When he refuses, she plays her trump card: She is his adopted daughter, last seen by him in Montenegro when she was three years old.Nero, of course, can't be bothered to stir himself from his gourmet meals or his orchids, but he sends sidekick Archie Goodwin to investigate. Along the way, the case is complicated by a murder and enough international intrigue to choke a fencing studio full of spies, which is pretty much what Archie and Nero are dealing with.This is the seventh in the series, first published in 1940, and it suffers from the same affliction that the other early entries do: The characters haven't quite gelled and Stout seems not have decided whether he's writing gritty noir or lighthearted caper. That, combined with an excess of complicated political history that is only cursorily explained, presumably because people of the time were well acquainted with it, make this one of my least favorite entries. It's not terrible but it doesn't reach the sublime heights of Stout at its best.
    • 4/5
      While Wolfe is back to his typical self (not leaving home as in the previous 2!), some of his personal background is revealed in this one. Archie seemed a bit more hardboiled than I remember! The series remains poised on the edge between hardboiled & Golden Age in style, a tricky feat that Stout manages to perfection.
    • 4/5
      My first Nero Wolfe mystery. Odd and took a while to get into but perserverence paid well. I will look for others.
    • 5/5
      This book opens with a visit from a young girl who tells Wolfe in a thick accent that his adopted daughter from Montenegro is in New York with her. As it turns out Wolfe does have an adopted daughter from Montenegro and when Wolfe meets his caller's friend she has the girl's birth certificate. After there is a murder at the studio where the girls teach fencing the real mystery begins. The weapon used was a col de mort. It is a device made for murder that slips over the blunt end of an epee and gives it a sharp point. It was stolen from a glass cabinet in the fencing master's office.Inspector Cramer decides that the best way to investigate the murder is to spend his time in Wolfe's office. He knows Wolfe will catch the murderer and he wants to be there when it happens. So he stays in the office and keeps four cops outside.There is a very entertaining vignette between Archie Goodwin and Donald Barrett. Wolfe wants to speak with Madame Zorka and Barrett knows where she is. He tells Archie to take Barrett and get Madame Zorka. Barrett is a rich grifter and he doesn't want Goodwin to know where Madame Zorka is. He offers Archie fifty dollars. Archie says make it a hundred and takes it. Then he gives it to a sidewalk vendor for two packs of gum, keep the change, and offers Barrett some gum. Three pages later Barrett takes Archie to see Madame Zorka, at his apartment. It was close to a Bud Abbott and Lou Costello routine.Barrett and his father are bankers and their deal for Bosnian forest rights is an important part of the story. Add a character named Princess Vladanka Donevitch, two foreign spies and it is quite an exotic story.Wolfe having an adopted daughter and how he handles it adds an interesting chapter to the life of Nero Wolfe. Archie can't resist and tells Wolfe he is going to marry her and then he and Wolfe can go to father and son golf tournaments. The book was interesting and fun. The ending was a fast jolt of excitement and suspense that was completely unexpected. Five Stars!
    • 4/5
      A young woman from the Balkans turns up in Nero Wolfe's office, screaming that he needs to save his daughter. This is news to both Wolfe and his assistant Goodwin, the narrator of this story, who learns a little more about his employer's past.The mystery starts off with a diamond theft and leads to murder, and Wolfe's professional reputation could be ruined if his daughter is guilty.This is my first Nero Wolfe and I love the snappy 30's dialogue where the law men greet each other with "Go to hell." Fun and a good mystery.
    • 3/5
      This book never really came alive to me. Perhaps the problem was that it was before the US entered WWII but after the war had broken out in Europe/England. It is less that the war casts a shadow on the book than the fact that the lack of shadow stand out. Wolfe is portrayed as a man who had lived much of his life in Europe and yet even when he makes amadversions aimed at the Germans and their allies in the Balkans this seem rather mild given the reality of what was happening in that part of the world even as this book was written and published.Again, as is so often true with popular books written in this time there is a large amount of casual racism. The actual case is highly contrived and in the end Wolfe doesn't really bring home any proof more than a series of allegations that could have easily been withstood by those he accused.The book does, however, stand out as one wherein the principal piece of proof (a picture of a woman who has rank and power in Yugoslavia) would be trivially easy to get not just today but even decades ago. Rereading books like these make one feel like one is living in the future.
    • 4/5
      Wolfe's adopted daughter comes to New York and seeks his help because she is entangled in a web of international intrigue and murder.
    • 5/5
      Nero Wolfe is confronted by a beautiful, tempermental female from the Balkans. She has been accused of stealing diamonds from a man's jacket. She demands he prove that she did not steal the stones. Her reason to choose him is not only his notoriety of solving crimes, she also claims to be his long-lost daughter!The diamond theft is solved but the dead bodies that appear complicate things even more. There are also documents, identities, rumours and questionable intrigues that also come into play. While Wolfe does the thinking, between his time with his orchids, wise-cracking Archie is doing the footwork to find out what is real and what isn't, who was where and who wasn't.Add to this Sargent Cramer's men staking out Wolfe's house to see who comes, who goes and where they go, while Cramer hangs out in Wolfe's house. It is not one of the simpler cases that have come through Wolfe's door.I've read a large number of these books, enjoyed them and was not disappointed with this one.
    • 3/5
      This is not my favorite Nero Wolfe for reason I could not discuss without spoiling a major plot twist. I can say it begins with a young woman showing up claiming to be Wolfe's adopted daughter, whom he had not seen since he adopted her out of pity in post-WWI Yugoslavia. She and another young woman are now fencing and dance teachers in new York, in a place run by another Yugoslav Wolfe knows through Mark Vukcic.. The other young wman has been accused of stealing diamond from a client, and Wolfe is asked to intervene. Then a man is murdered with a fencing sword, and again one of the young woman is accused.
    • 4/5
      This was definitely a political book written on the Eve of World War II, but it was interesting nonetheless. This episode gave some background on Nero Wolfe that it appears even his closest ally didn't know. There were lots of twists and turns because of the political intrigue, but it was interesting. I liked the ending, but this one didn't explain how Nero Wolfe discovered the true plot twist (or I missed it, I was listening to the audiobook). Trigger warning: prejudices of the era are apparent in the writing.
    • 3/5
      I’d read one of the Wolfe novels several years back but wasn’t really grabbed by it. After watching and enjoying the dramatizations of the Nero Wolfe mysteries with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chakin, though, I decided to read one that I’d seen on screen. While this book isn’t making me want to buy the entire output of Mr. Stout, it was a very fun read. Goodwin’s voice is great (“alphabet piano”, heh!), and the mystery was much more understandable than it was in the movie version. (Pause for Yet Another Plea For Subtitles/Captions, Damn It!) There were some ethnic and racial issues that bothered me, but overall I enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      An utter Nero Wolfe fan, I rank Over... as one of my favorites. Nero, to his disgust, becomes involved in international intrigue. Originally copyrighted in 1939, the novel refers to issues and situations emerging in western and eastern Europe at the time. Characters include two young women from Montenegro, one of whom claims to be Nero's adopted daughter; a mustachioed proprietor of a dancing and fencing school, a genteel but corrupt law partner and his impetuous son, a cultured and polite FBI agent who quotes the laws verbatim to Wolfe, and the mysterious "Zorka,' whose origins are shrouded in mystery. The two "Balkans,' as Archie calls the women, become suspects when one of the clients at the fencing studio is run through with an epee. Inspector Cramer, out of his depth, laments, "...I don't kick on any ordinary murder, it's my job and I try to handle it, but I hate these damn foreign mix-ups...even the dead man wasn't a plain honest-to-God American--" As the story unfolds, Nero Wolfe lets slip some interesting facts about his personal history.
    • 4/5
      I’ve been trying to read the Nero Wolfe novels in order and have finished the first four but we needed a book to listen to in the car and I had this one, number 7 in the series, from audible so we listened to it on our road trip last weekend. A refugee from Yugoslavia (the time is during Hitler’s rise to power) gets in trouble over stolen diamonds at her place of work. She seeks Wolfe’s help on the basis that she is his adopted daughter. When Archie goes to handle the diamond problem, it seems to disappear but then there is a murder. Suddenly this turns into an international affair with high stakes and Cramer is being stonewalled in his investigation, even by his own superiors. He stakes himself out in Wolfe’s office figuring that this will be the only way he will be able to get what he needs to solve the crime. He’s right, of course. We figured out most of the solution before the end, but there were a few incidental surprises and it’s fun to watch Wolfe at work. By this one, Stout is really hitting his stride on the series that has been so popular for so long. Archie has a classic move to remove a witness from right under noses of the police. This was an enjoyable listen and would be a good read.