New Mystery Remembering Nebraska's forgotten "whodunit queen"

When reporter Eva Mahoney arrived in Valentine in 1930 to profile America’s next great mystery novelist, she found Mignon Good Eberhart in a “pleasant little home,” struggling to visualize her next murder.

Bewitched by her new surroundings, the big skies and grassy dunes, the author had contrived a remote hunting lodge in the Nebraska Sandhills as the site for her fictional crime. It had log doors, “a great, deep fireplace made of native, unfinished rock,” Eberhart wrote, and a hodgepodge of antique pewter lamps, a quirk of the cabin’s late owner, a prominent trustee from the fictional city of...