A newly minted partner at a prestigious law firm must fight for his reputation and freedom when he stands trial for his wife’s murder in Call the Witness, a taut 1960s crime novel steeped in small-town suspicion, legal intrigue, and simmering class tensions.
First published by Dodd, Mead and Company in January 1961, Edna Sherry’s evocative standalone legal drama returns to print this month as part of Stark House’s Black Gat mass market series, emerging from more than sixty years of obscurity.
The Cincinnati-born writer, renowned for her gift for suspense, is best remembered for the 1948 thriller Sudden Fear, adapted into a film noir starring Joan Crawford and now regarded as a genre classic. In Call the Witness, she displays her sharpest instincts, drawing inspiration from a notorious real-life case that unfolded across the Atlantic in Liverpool thirty years earlier. Whereas her post-war contemporaries often featured stock characters and familiar plots, Sherry’s work pulses with psychological edge, subtle social critique, and a relentless sense of tension.’
Ashley Lawson, an Edgar Award-nominated author, notes in the book’s introduction that Sherry ‘writes about people rather than situations, and most of her characters are fully-fleshed, complex, and believable,’ singling out the novel as ‘key evidence in our case that this author deserves greater recognition.’”
My review of this tense, atmospheric legal drama of suspicion, social fault lines, and a small town ready to judge was published today in the Lancashire Post. Previously, it was published in Book-marked, the website of well-known book critic Pam Norfolk, on September 21, 2025. Archived online access to these reviews as they originally appeared can be found at these weblinks: