The Night of the Wolf

Janet Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine has written: "... Paul Halter's stories have a special combination of atmospheric setting and brilliant classical plotting that make them irresistible." This, the first Halter book to be published in English, is a collection of ten short stories which display his talents to the full.

A brief synopsis of each story appears below:

 
 -The Abominable Snowman 
 Witnesses cannot believe their eyes as they see and hear the victim struggling against a snowman with a bayonet. When there are only the man's footprints leading to the body and the snowman turns out to be just a snowman, their bafflement knows no bounds.
-The Dead Dance at Night  
 Dr. Twist hears the story of a family's decadent past and an inexplicable random murder and solves the mystery of coffins dancing inside a sealed crypt.
-The Call of the Lorelei  
The German guest at a party in Alsace has been telling how he hears the Lorelei's siren song. When he is apparently lured to his death, his body found floating in a pond with only his footprints in the surrounding snow, Dr. Twist deduces how he was murdered.  
-The Golden Ghost 
 A lonely miser receives an unexpected Christmas guest: a poor match-girl who is being stalked  by a glowing spectre that leaves no footprints in the snow.
-The Tunnel of Death  
 A ruthless business mogul becomes the third mysterious shooting death inside the tunnel of the world's longest escalator, despite being surrounded on all sides by a police guard.
-The Cleaver  
 Owen Burns hears how a man who has had a premonition of murder sees the killer an hour before the victim dies elsewhere exactly as foreseen. Nobody could have had time to reach the victim or been in possession of the clues found on the body, yet it happened. Burns explains how it was done. 
-The Flower Girl  
 Owen Burns is told of the miser who denies the existence of Santa Claus, yet sees the marks in the snow where a sleigh has come down from the sky and taken off again. After the miser's body is found lying in unbroken snow, Burns explains how it all happened.
-Rippermania
 The senior detective poses as a delusional paranoid in order to entrap a psychiatrist suspected of a string of Ripper-like murders. When he gives the police the slip while marauding at night, things go horribly wrong.
-Murder in Cognac
 A retired winemaker secludes himself at the top of a tower because of death threats from a  magician he has exposed. Despite the police guarding the only entrance, he is struck down and it is left to Dr. Twist to explain how and identify the culprit.
-Night of the Wolf
 When a man is slashed to death in his own house surrounded by freshly fallen snow, and the only prints are from a large animal, the villagers naturally assume it was the werewolf long reputed to haunt the region. But there is a more rational explanation ... or is there?