How long does it take to read The Leavenworth Case?
a lawyer's story
The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green takes about 5 hours 37 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 37 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1878. 306 pages, about 84,150 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 21 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 37 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 30 minutes |
The page count is the median across 213 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Horatio Leavenworth is a New York merchant whose material wealth is matched by his eminence in the community and reputation for good works. He is also the guardian of two striking nieces who share his Fifth Avenue mansion. Mary, her uncle's favorite, is to inherit his fortune at his death. As this mystery opens, that lamentable event has just occurred. Leavenworth has been shot to death and circumstances point to one of his young wards. Circumstantial evidence points in one direction; but is that the trail to follow? Not to give anything away, but Yale University used this book in its law school to demonstrate the fallability of such evidence. First published in 1878, nine years before the debut of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, this atmospheric and suspenseful mystery well deserves a modern audience. When someone shoots Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy retired merchant, through the head in his library late one night, the evidence at the inquest indicates that no one could have left the victim's locked Manhattan mansion before the discovery of the body the next morning. Suspicion thus falls on members of the household, specifically the dead man's nieces, Mary and Eleanore, only one of whom stands to benefit from their uncle's death. Everett Raymond, a junior partner in a New York law firm that had Leavenworth as a client, teams with unassuming official investigator Ebenezer Gryce to seek the truth. Green (1846-1935), whose smooth prose remains fresh, makes Gryce an interesting enough character to leave fans of traditional whodunits eager to see more of the detective in reissues of his further exploits.
Subjects: Fiction, Merchants, Police, Crimes against, Investigation, Inheritance and succession
