The Hangman's Tree (1949) by Dorothy Cameron Disney

Dorothy Cameron Disney was an American journalist, writer and columnist whose column, "Can This Marriage Be Saved," ran for three decades in Ladies' Home Journal, but she also authored nine detective novels – published between 1936 and 1949. I remember some were amused a woman named Disney wrote suspenseful, bloodcurdling tales of murder and detection when her work briefly resurfaced in the early 2010s. Disney's Death in the Backseat (1937) and The Strawstack Murders (1939) showed her novels aren't novelties on account of the name on the cover.Mike Grost called Disney "one of Rinehart's most gifted followers" who "deserves to be revived." I highly rated Disney's two aforementioned novels, but, despite recent reprints from Wildside Press and Stark House Press of Death in the Backseat, Crimson Friday (1943) and The 17th Letter (1945), she remains largely forgotten, mostly out-of-print today. It probably didn't help Disney was not a wildly prolific writer who only wrote standalone…