Read The Circular Study in Englishwith every sentence explained

The Circular Study by Anna Katharine Green was first published in 1900. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under mystery and crime and thriller and suspense.

A rose-red light. An oriental dagger. A golden cross laid on a dead man's heart.

Old Mr. Gryce of the New York police is thinking of retiring to his farm when a message reaches headquarters: an unknown lady has paid a street boy to report "a strange crime" in one of the city's last old mansions. Inside, Gryce finds the wealthy recluse Mr. Adams stabbed in his circular study, a room of books, tapestries and curios lit by a lamp that changes colour at the touch of a button.

The clues are as odd as the room: a trail of black sequins leading to the body, a silver comb on the floor, and a deaf and mute servant who silently acts out the killing. Gryce has seen many murders, but never one like this.

Anna Katharine Green, often called the mother of the detective novel, was writing clever American mysteries before Sherlock Holmes appeared. The Circular Study is one of her most atmospheric puzzles.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.