Having heard that her first husband, B. J. Lockwood, had amassed a fortune in Mexico, and with her second husband now a helpless invalid and dying, Gilda Decker hires Tom Aragon to go to Mexico to search for Lockwood. The stated reason: Gilda wants her share of Lockwood’s money — he owes her. But as Aragon questions those who knew Lockwood, he finds the man’s past shrouded in mystery; and as the young lawyer gets closer and closer to the truth, people start dying, one by one. Only on the very last pages does he, and the reader, learn the fantastic explanation for why he was really hired. This is another strong, unusual suspense novel by the author of Beyond This Point Are Monsters.

Dr. Paul Prye, who mode his effective first appearance in The Invisible Worm, continues to annoy people and catch murderers in this present opus. Dr. Prye was threatened by Joan, a hefty blonde of eighteen, with a quick demise in the bottom of the lake if he declared her insane, but it was Joan, not Dr. Prye, whom they fished out of the lake. Joan was just one of those people who from birth seemed destined to murder at the hands of most of her acquaintances. One of the other lake shore residents was picked as the guilty party until he, too, made his exit from life via the lake. Miss Emily Bonner, the self-made arbiter of the social life of Lake Rosseau, lived behind her field glasses,...

This strikingly original love story deals with the disintegration of a marriage, a breakdown which occurred against the wishes of its principals and in spite of their good intentions. Martha Pearson, the central figure, is a young woman of character, whose goodness seemed almost forbidding at times. In the midst of serious difficulties with her husband, Charles, she was resolved to be faithful to him, to make something of the partnership on which he seemed to depend so completely. Then Charles went away for a while to mend his health and for the first time in years Martha had the opportunity to assess her life. In the crisis precipitated by the return of her first lover, she found that her...

Given its extraordinary span, its international scope, and its variant styles and groundbreaking stylists, A Century of Great Suspense Stories is a singular achievement. A bestselling master of suspense himself Jeffery Deaver had the enviable task of selecting from the thousands of stories written over the past one hundred years those which best represented the classic form, as well as the justly celebrated authors whose ironic twists and stunning payoffs left a lasting, vivid, and unnerving impression. The result is a triumph. In this ambitious anthology you’ll revel in the sardonic, overtly amoral plotting of Patricia Highsmith. You’ll rediscover the strangely poignant and surprising...

The decomposed body of a much-loved eight-year-old, Annamay Hyatt, is found in a wooded creekside area. To an agonizing degree everyone concerned with Annamay feels responsible. To an even more agonizing degree, someone is. The effect of the child’s violent death runs through the community like a plague. It infects not only her parents and her cousin, Dru, the same age as Annamay, but everyone who lives or works in the area, from the aging gay who gives young parties to the white-robed con man who comes to the creek and hears a banshee. Perhaps most bereft is Annamay’s grandfather who studies the ancient Japanese fish in the koi pond, appalled that they and he should still be alive...

The premise of Margaret Millar’s new suspense novel is simple and shocking. Charlie Gowen, a handsome young man with a badly disordered past, finds himself profoundly drawn toward a nine-year-old girl. His past record suggests, even to Charlie himself, that his sick passion for little Jessie is placing her life in jeopardy. But he can’t stay away from her school, her street, her house. If the premise of Mrs. Millar’s story is simple enough, its development is complex and compelling. Charlie’s fiancée Louise, who loves him desperately, risks her life in an effort to save him from the dark forces of his own nature. Half a dozen other adults, Jessie’s parents, friends and neighbors, become...

The request was an odd one, and it came to Quinn from an unlikely source. Her name was Sister Blessing of the Salvation, and she belonged to a quasi-religious colony which had established itself in the California mountains, far from the world, the flesh, and the devil. Though money was forbidden in the colony, she paid Quinn one hundred and twenty dollars to find out if a man named Patrick O’Gorman was still living in the desert town of Chicote. It turned out that O’Gorman had disappeared under mysterious circumstances five years before. As Quinn investigated these circumstances, he discovered that Sister Blessing and some of her fellow colonists were as deeply involved with the world...

Margaret Millar’s latest book — which comes after a break of six years — is another superb example of the fusion of the novel of character and the puzzle of suspense. If it were not about a crime, it would still be an absorbing account of people, precisely studied and perfectly placed in their unfamiliar setting. That setting is a remote ranch on the border between California and Mexico. Robert Osborne inherited the ranch when his father was killed while driving a tractor: his father was usually drunk anyway, and no one was surprised that he’d had an accident. But now Robert has been missing for over a year, and is presumed dead by everyone except his doting mother. Robert disappeared...

She dreamed that she had died four years ago. The dream was terrifyingly real. Then Daisy discovered that the grave and the granite cross were really there in the cemetery, the date of death the same as she had dreamed, but a stranger’s name cut in the stone. Daisy Harker’s search for the lost day of her imagined death becomes a quest for the meaning of several lives, and for her own survival. As her nightmare emerges into reality, it threatens her comfortable relationship with her husband Jim, and thrusts her into more disturbing relationships: with Steve Pinata, the detective of uncertain origins: with Stanley Fielding, who lives by his wits on the edge of the law: and with the dark...

Lucille Morrow, the central figure in this novel of psychological mystery, was, to all appearances, a fortunate and happy woman. In early middle life she retained the beauty of her youth: her husband. Dr. Morrow, was wealthy and devoted to her; she was the mistress of a large and charming house, properly staffed. No one was more astonished than her immediate family when Lucille, in mad fear and horror, ran away from her comfortable home, her loving husband, and all the things she had seemed to value. In one day she changed from a serene and self-possessed woman into a creature dominated by a fear so intense that she was glad to be shut up behind the iron gates of an asylum for the...