by Ellery Queen
Ellery is invited to a dinner party of an acquaintance at the Hotel Chancellor in New York City  where they find a dead body in the waiting room of his friend's office.  The unidentified man is on the floor with all his clothes on backwards,  all of the items in the room are facing backwards and the peeling of a Chinese orange are in a bowl.  And to make matters worse, both doors are locked from the inside.  Inspector Queen and his police force are baffled and Ellery is intrigued so they work together to solve the case.  More than one of the suspects are lying and all their stories and motives are suspect.  Ellery has to figure out what the "backwardness" meaning is and does it have anything to do with the Chinese orange?  

I truly enjoyed this book.  It was a lot of fun and since it was written in the 1930s, it had a completely different feel to it than the mystery novels written today.  Although I do enjoy the forensic based novels of today, I really like the old fashioned detective novels of the 30s and 40s.  They're a lot of fun and include more deductive reasoning and not so much science.  The Ellery Queen books were written from the 1930s to the 1960s by a writing team under the pseudonym of Ellery Queen.  I don't know how many of them there are but I'm hoping to read them all.