conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled The Mother Hunt about Nero, Wolfe, York with the genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Mystery?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It is always a treat to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. The man has entered our folklore. The New York Times Book Review
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book titled The Mother Hunt about Nero, Wolfe, York with the genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Mystery?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Mother Hunt: A baby is left in a young widow\'s vestibule, along with a note implying that her late husband is the baby\'s father.\nThe widow hires Nero Wolfe to identify and locate the baby\'s birth mother.\nThroughout the Wolfe oeuvre, Archie\'s main romantic interest is Lily Rowan, a Manhattan socialite and heiress who, after an incident in a bull pasture, nicknames Archie "Escamillo".\nBut Stout portrays their relationship as two close friends who share an intimacy of long standing, rather than one of exclusivity.\nStout makes it clear that Archie has other romances.\nOne with Phoebe Gunther, in The Silent Speaker, has an exceptionally powerful spark.\nIn The Mother Hunt, Stout for the first time makes unambiguous an affair between Archie and another major character.\nIn a rare physical outburst, Wolfe becomes so angry and frustrated at one point that he throws his suit jacket at Archie.\nLucy Valdon has recently been widowed by the accidental death of her husband, the novelist Richard Valdon.\nLucy has a surprise waiting for her in her vestibule one evening: an abandoned baby, dressed, with a note pinned to a blanket.\nThe note claims that the baby is Richard\'s son.\nLucy wants to learn who the mother is.\nThat information would help determine whether her husband and the mother had been intimate, and therefore the likelihood that the child is in fact Richard\'s.\nWolfe is reluctant as always, but agrees to investigate.\nArchie examines the clothes that the baby was wearing and spots an unusual item: the baby\'s overalls have horsehair buttons, apparently handmade.\nAfter Archie draws a blank trying to track the buttons down via businesses in the garment trade, Wolfe tries a tactic that he uses to good effect in other cases.\nHe advertises for information.\nThe advertisement succeeds in prompting a call from someone who has seen a similar button, and when Archie follows up he eventually locates Ellen Tenzer in Mahopac, about fifty miles north of New York City.\nMiss Tenzer is a retired nurse who from time to time cares for babies temporarily.\nShe is unwilling to help Archie, though, and orders him off her property.\nArchie complies, Miss Tenzer disappears, and the next day she is found, strangled, in her car on a Manhattan street.\nWith that line of investigation closed to them, Wolfe and Archie try another.\nLucy arranges for several of Richard\'s acquaintances to come to the brownstone.\nWolfe asks that they each supply him with a list of all the women with whom Richard was in contact during a three-month period roughly corresponding to the date of the baby\'s conception.\nA list of 148 names results, and it takes nearly four weeks for Archie, Saul, Fred and Orrie to verify that none of the women had an unaccounted for baby following the period in question.\nFinally, Wolfe decides to go for the swindle.\nHis plan involves the Gazette, Lon Cohen\'s employer, and it succeeds in flushing the baby\'s mother from hiding.\nBut then she is found dead, also strangled.\nWhen Inspector Cramer learns that there is a connection between the dead woman and Wolfe, he shows up at the front stoop, forcing Wolfe and Archie to flee via the back door.\nWolfe is furious about the murders, particularly the second, and desperately wants to expose the killer himself.\nBut if Cramer finds him, he will either have to tell Cramer about the search for the baby\'s mother or withhold evidence in a capital case.\nTo avoid having to make that choice, Wolfe and Archie hole up in Lucy\'s house — she, her baby and her staff are away for a few days.\nWhile there, Wolfe has an insight about how the murderer and Ellen Tenzer might have become acquainted.\nThat insight leads to the traditional Wolfe finale, with witnesses and suspects gathered together, but this time it\'s in someone else\'s house.