Two women are dead inside a room locked from within. There is no clear escape route, no believable suspect—and no agreement about the strange voice heard at the scene.

When news of the brutal Rue Morgue murders grips Paris, the police are overwhelmed by a crime that appears to defy reason. Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter have been violently killed inside their fourth-floor apartment, yet the doors and windows were secured. Witnesses report hearing two voices during the attack, but no one can identify the language spoken by the mysterious intruder.

Enter C. Auguste Dupin.

Brilliant, eccentric, and fascinated by the workings of the human mind, Dupin approaches the impossible crime through observation, imagination, and exacting logic. While the authorities focus on conventional suspects, he studies the details they have overlooked: an unusual strand of hair, extraordinary physical strength, conflicting testimony, and a window that may not be as securely locked as it first appears.

Piece by piece, Dupin reconstructs the events of that terrifying night and arrives at a solution as astonishing as the murders themselves.

Atmospheric, intellectually gripping, and darkly suspenseful, Edgar Allan Poe’s *The Murders in the Rue Morgue* introduced one of literature’s earliest great detectives and established many of the conventions that continue to define detective fiction today.

Narrated by Tony J. Martin.