How long does it take to read Cold Steal?
Cold Steal by Phoebe Atwood Taylor takes about 5 hours 16 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 16 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1939. 287 pages, about 78,925 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 46 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 16 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 17 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
It's a winter day in Dalton (a New England town near Boston) and Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", is returning to his new house, which he's never seen. He's inherited money from an uncle and toured the world, and left plans for his home to be built while on his travels, but now he must return home and produce the next volume of the adventures of Lieutenant Haseltine. On the train to Dalton, he meets a mousy woman named Miss Chard (known to all as Swiss Chard) and a beautiful young woman with a brown paper package and a secret. His new home proves a delight, and it includes a kitchen filled with red appliances, a library with ladders, and a garage complete with the pickaxed corpse of Medora, the crabby next-door neighbor. Leonidas assembles a gang of assistants, including dotty housewife Cassie Price and former car thief Cuff (who has reformed and joined the police force). Together, they defend Witherall's new red refrigerator against thieves, track down the missing envelope of money and bring the murderer to justice.
Subjects: mystery & detective fiction, fiction, Fiction, mystery & detective, general
